The Pope addressed several hot-button issues during his flight home from Africa yesterday, such as the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, religious fundamentalism, and the latest Vatican leak scandal.

Vatican Radio is reporting on the in-flight press briefing that took place on the papal jet while flying to Rome after a five-day, three-nation visit to Africa last week.

During the briefing, Pope Francis said he was struck by the crowds that greeted him wherever he traveled during his visit, and the "very great sense of welcome that he encountered. Each country was unique, he said, from the modern and developed Kenya to Uganda with its legacy of martyrs and the Central African Republic with its great desire for peace and reconciliation after years of civil strife.

Pope Francs was then asked about religious fundamentalism and the attacks by ISIS terrorists on Paris.

“ . . . [W]e are all God’s children, we all have the same Father… we need to live peacefully alongside one another, develop friendships,” the pope responded, according to The Catholic Herald. 

He then turned his attention to fundamentalism within the Church.

“Fundamentalism is a sickness that is in all religions. We Catholics have some — and not some, many — who believe they possess the absolute truth and go ahead dirtying the other with calumny, with disinformation, and doing evil. They do evil. I say this because it is my Church.”

Religious fundamentalism is not a religion, he said, it’s idolatry because ideas and “false certainties” take the place of faith, love of God, and love of neighbor.

“You cannot cancel a whole religion because there is a group or many groups of fundamentalists at certain moments of history,” the Pope said.

He was also asked about his visits to Uganda and Kenya, where new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths continue, and whether or not he thought the Church “should change its teaching” about the use of condoms.

He said this was an ongoing question for Catholic moral theologians – whether condom use in that case would be an instrument to prevent death, or whether it would be used as a contraceptive which would be against Church teaching on the openness to life.

The pope than said the question was just too narrow. People are dying in those countries first of all because of a lack of clean water and adequate food. Once these life-threatening issues are dealt with, then it would be “legitimate to ask whether it is licit” to use condoms to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS.

As for the latest “Vatileaks” scandal involving the arrest of three Vatican employees who stole information about Vatican corruption and gave it to the Italian media, Francis acknowledged that “an error was made” in the appointment of those employees.

He also said that he “hasn’t lost any sleep” over the ongoing trial and that none of the leaked information surprised him because he already knew about the corruption inside the Vatican.

The pope then pointed out that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, is who began the process of dealing with the Vatican’s handling of finances.

“He was the first one to speak against corruption,” Francis said.

Although he hoped that the trial of the three persons involved in the scandal would be over by the beginning of the Holy Year of Mercy on December 8, recent delays have made that impossible.

He also spoke of his upcoming trip to Mexico, the details of which have not yet been released.

The full text of his remarks can be found here.

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