When Pope Benedict XVI traveled to Africa recently, the trip — as we all know — was all about sex. The Catholic Church is well known for hating it — and especially people taking any pleasure in it. So the story was simple for the international media: Pope goes to Africa. Pope unrealistically says “no” to condoms. Pope is a heartless oppressive creep — “discredited,” as one of the president’s faith-based advisers might have put it.

The full story, of course, is much more complicated. And beautiful. And uplifting.

Yes, the Catholic Church says “no” to the contraceptive mentality in which the West stakes its hope — to the demographic despair of Europe, and to the misery of aimless women and men depicted on Sex and the City–like dramas throughout your cable box. The Church teaches marital fidelity and the deepest respect for the human person. How could it not when, as Genesis 1:27 teaches, man and woman are made in the image and likeness of God?

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And so, when Benedict was asked about condoms en route to Africa, his answer was thoroughly sensible and humanitarian. As he has done previously, he echoed themes that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, proclaimed lovingly throughout his life. He talked about humanizing sexuality and “true friendship.” The culture of contraception has its share of Trojan Horses — for single men and women, for families, and for communities suffering from sexually transmitted pandemics (a predicament another papal predecessor, Pope Paul VI, presciently warned about four decades ago).

Benedict further elaborated on sex and the sexes during a meeting “on the promotion of women” at Saint Anthony’s in Luanda. The pontiff said:

As you know, my dear friends, this order of love belongs to the intimate life of God himself, the Trinitarian life, the Holy Spirit being the personal hypostasis of love. As my predecessor Pope John Paul II once wrote, “in God’s eternal plan, woman is the one in whom the order of love in the created world of persons takes first root” (Mulieris Dignitatem, 29). . . .

Man and woman are both called to live in profound communion through a reciprocal recognition of one another and the mutual gift of themselves, working together for the common good through the complementary aspects of masculinity and femininity. Who today can fail to recognize the need to make more room for the “reasons of the heart”? In a world like ours, dominated by technology, we feel the need for this feminine complementarity, so that the human race can live in the world without completely losing its humanity. Think of all the places afflicted by great poverty or devastated by war, and of all the tragic situations resulting from migrations, forced or otherwise. It is almost always women who manage to preserve human dignity, to defend the family and to protect cultural and religious values.

As zenit.org reports, Benedict “underlined Mary’s role in the Gospel story of the wedding at Cana,” noting that “her maternal mediation thus made possible the ‘good wine,’ prefiguring a new covenant between divine omnipotence and the poor but receptive human heart.”

The pontiff extended a special greeting to all women, “to whom God has entrusted the wellsprings of life,” saying, “I invite you to live and to put your trust in life, because the living God has put his trust in you!”

He called on his listeners to be aware of the “adverse conditions to which many women have been — and continue to be — subjected, paying particular attention to ways in which the behavior and attitudes of men, who at times show a lack of sensitivity and responsibility, may be to blame.”

He added, “This forms no part of God’s plan.”

Not the patronizing, unrealistic, misogynistic, oppressive pope you’re used to reading about? 

The world of Newsweek — I pick on Newsweek because it took pains to proclaim that Christianity is dying just in time for Easter (despite a “The Decline and Fall of Christian America” cover, it was a stretch the magazine couldn’t quite make) — might find the pope vs. sex story sexier, but the real story is at the core of Christianity, never mind humanity. And it’s incredibly timely this weekend.