Cameroonians wave good-bye with papal flags as Pope Benedict XVI's plane departs today. (CNS/Reuters)

“It’s almost as if the Pope has made two separate visits to Cameroon: the one reported internationally and the one Africans actually experienced.

“In the U.S. and many other parts of the world, coverage has been ‘all condoms, all the time,’ triggered by comments from Benedict aboard the papal plane to the effect that condoms aren’t the right way to fight AIDS. In Africa, meanwhile, the trip has been a hit, beginning with Benedict’s dramatic insistence that Christians must never be silent in the face of ‘corruption and abuses of power,’ and extending through a remarkable meeting with African Muslims in which the Pope said more clearly and succinctly what he wanted to say three years ago in his infamous Regensburg address, and without the gratuitous quotation from a Byzantine emperor.

“Vast and pumped-up crowds flocked to see the Pope, and Benedict seemed swept up in the enthusiasm. Twice he referred to Africa as the ‘continent of hope,’ and at one point, this consummate theologian even mused aloud about a new burst of intellectual energy in Africa that might generate a 21st-century version of the famed school of Alexandria, which gave the early Church such luminaries as Clement and Origen.”

So reports John Allen, who is on the ground in Africa covering Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to that continent.

Allen suggests the news media aren’t to blame for this bizarre discrepancy between how we in the West are perceiving the Pope’s trip negatively, courtesy of the media fixation on the condom remarks, and how it is actually being received as a triumph by the Africans who are rejoicing over the Holy Father’s presence in their midst.

Allen is a brilliant Vatican reporter, but he’s flat wrong about this. It’s specifically the media’s fault that Benedict’s matter-of-fact restatement of Church teachings about condoms was blown up by reporters and editors into a manufactured public relations “crisis.”

Thankfully, the Western media’s capacity to confuse the good African Catholics who love their Pope is limited.