OK Joe, what about the myth peddled by the president of the Vatican pontifical council for the family, that the HIV virus can pass through the membrane of condoms with the consequence that condoms are helping to spread AIDS by promoting a false sense of security?

The World Health Organisation line on Cardinal Trujillo is: "These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million."

Ignoring the question of what good Trujillo thinks he's doing by pontificating on a matter so far beyond his authority (you would perhaps say he's not likely to be sincere anyway, being "upper management") his intervention would certainly be consistent with his church's long history of "imposing answers."

Until very recent times, any tradition of independent thinking within Catholicism has barely existed outside the US, and even now there are substantial communities, some of them relatively primitive, where it has yet to penetrate. In such communities the church retains - and sometimes exploits - the capacity to do great harm with its myths.