The problem here is, you are going to lose your relatives either way, if you escape losing yourself.
Why? Because AIDS is already here with us; no one knows for certain when the disease’s cure is going to be found. Chances are, given this is not a living virus, but most likely a chemical virus, based on rumours around its origin, no cure is ever going to be found anytime soon. If the cure is never going to be found anytime soon, then how are you not going to lose your relatives including yourself through againg while waiting for the cure to be found?
If you choose to use condom everytime you have sex, it is very likely that you will never have children, most definitely for the rest of your remaining life. That means you cannot bequeath your progeny; consequently the population of your grandfather dies off through you. Now multiply that with the number of people in your village; county; district, &c. Then you find that you have a people whose populations are being checked by the presence of the disease. So in a way, you are losing your relatives by not producing any of your own progenies. If you are age 40 today; in 20 years you will be 60 years old. Should by then AIDS’ cure not be found yet, you will continue using condom. But age would also be catching up with you, if you lucky to still be alive and kicking then.
If you choose to follow Pope‘s advice on the other hand, and stopped using condoms, that means you and your partner/s must adhere to strict sexual practices - provided none of you has acquired the disease yet. That way you can bequeath your progenies. If your relatives too adhere to strict sexual practices, they too will bequeath their progenies. However, if none of you adhere to strict sexual practices, chances are:
a). Lives are going to be lost because of the disease. So yes, you will lose your relatives, or even yourself;
b). You will produce offsprings who are themselves AIDS’ riddled; therefore chances are, they won’t live; and not for long should some lived.
As you can see, both of these scenerios are not what one wants. The message from the Pope however, is a double-edged sward that the very people who are gravely affected by the scourge of the disease must pick their ways about carefully to see that they avoid extinction one way or the other, because both options leads to extinction, provided the cure for the disease is never found, like there is no cure for cancer.
Under the condition that the cure is not available, a people can become extinct through use of condoms; or a people can become extinct through erratic sexual practices.
The option then is, one has to be loyal to his/her partner; and teach the coming generation to follow the same strict loyalty or perished. The problem however, for us African men who by and large marry more than one wife, some women just looking at their shapely body, is irresistible. The feeling would be, I have to have that babe, for real! Then the next thing you will realise is, you are in trouble or shes in trouble.
Many of you are not happy of course by what the Pope has said. But looking at the message from philosophical vantage point, one can either argue that the Pope is trying to entrenched moral conduct in society by making sure people adhere to some moral practices and standards. For instance, one can argue that the Pope doesn’t want people to be sexually promiscuous; AIDS is only a blessing in disguise therefore - helping to shape that moral conducts that otherwise, people would not have bothered about, whether the Pope preached about morality a thousand times a day. So in a way the Pope is taking advantage of the scourge of the disease, to drive home the message of morality. In which case the Pope is being saint, and caring.
But the other angle of looking at it is that the Pope is evil. This is because the Pope is telling you that you should not use condoms while engaging in sex with your partner. So the Pope in way is sending people to their death, knowing fully that the deadly disease has no cure. Why would he on earth tell people not to use condoms while having sex? Therefore the Pope must be advicing people wrongly so that millions can die off. For, without using condoms, many people are going to be infected by the disease, and almost all of them will die sooner than normally they would.
Those who hold this position may indeed be correct as well but to a point. They might be correct in that if the Pope bought into the notion of population control, then obviously he would advocate for no use of condoms so that as many people as possible contract the disease so they can die off. But such conclusion might be misleading because the Pope is not telling people to engage in sexual immorality. If the Pope was telling people not to use condoms while at the same time he advises people to have individual freedom to engage in all kinds of sex, then yes, one would hold the Pope squarely responsible. But I don’t think the Pope is telling people to engage in all kinds of sexual activities.
Further, from economic perspective, the Pope might in a way be helping the downtroddens of the earth fight off big businesses and conglomerates that are taking advantage of the scourge of the disease to maximize their profits through production and sale of condoms. By not using condoms, you will then be fighting off exploitations by big businesses and conglomerates that would otherwise be laughing all the way to the bank, as you spend your meagre earnings on condoms, while preventing you to multiply at the same time. The Pope‘s message mitigates against such exploitations; and help you multiply, should you adhere to strict sexual conducts.
So this is not an issue that can be treated emotionally. You have to look at it from the philosophical, moral and economic point of view to make an informed decision.
OpaA
