I believe the statistics show that Catholics use birth control methods at about the same rate as their non-Catholic neighbors

That may well be true; I do not profess to know. However in Africa that rate is obviously much lower than in many other places. Actively discouraging the use of condoms there is tantamount to mass murder on a gargantuan scale, and the Pope cannot possibly be ignorant of that fact. I accept that his religious beliefs may be more important to him than the lives of a few million Africans but that doesn't make him right. Perhaps he may be more concerned for their 'souls' than their bodies, I don't know. What I do know is, he's profoundly wrong. If there is such a thing as 'evil', he seems to me to be the embodiment of it.