Nicholas Kristof is a smart man but I think he kind of misses the point when he talks about Catholic groups in Africa:
But there’s more to the picture than that. In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches. One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch when it bans condoms even among married couples where one partner is H.I.V.-positive. To me at least, this church — obsessed with dogma and rules and distracted from social justice — is a modern echo of the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized.
Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.
This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.
The problem is that the good deeds and hard-work of one group promote the dogma and hatred of the other group; in the end all these good deeds only make-up for a small percentage of the damage done by the church in the third world, it is time for the people who claim to care about the third world to stop promoting the archaic and hateful religion that leads to most of the problems in places like Africa.