Book Review: Catholic Voices and AIDS

Catholic Voices ed. Austen Ivereigh & Kathleen Griffin, Darton Longman & Todd, 2011, £14.99

As World AIDS Day takes place on Sunday - John Thornhill , a Trustee of Catholics for AIDS Prevention & Support focuses on one chapter in this book, which deals with the issue of AIDS.

Catholic Voices is a collection of essays which attempt to explain the Church's teaching on the key social and moral challenges of the age. Chapter 8 looks at Catholics and AIDS. This book attempts to take a reasoned and balanced look at the Church's response to the pandemic. It recognises the magnitude of the AIDS crisis.

It acknowledges the catastrophic death rates among young adults of both sexes and from all walks of life.

It recognises that HIV and AIDS is intimately associated with social and economic inequality and exclusion. Catholics & AIDS focuses on the 22.5 million sub-Saharan African men, women and children living with the virus: 70 percent of the total number of people globally living with the virus. It recognises the cultural complexities of Hiv prevention campaigns: citing the work of the controversial and rigorously contested Harvard anthropologist, Edward Green, who attributes the rapid spread of the virus in Africa, to the export of a Western model of prevention based primarily on condom use rather than behaviour change.[1] It stresses the teaching of the Church in terms of abstinence and fidelity; and it highlights the contribution of Catholic agencies and communities globally in prevention and care.

Perhaps because of the magnitude of the AIDS crisis and perhaps because of the multi-faceted nature of the pandemic: this book has two major weaknesses:

HIV: the guest at our table: Catholic Voices is written for Catholics in the UK, yet it says very little, if anything at all, about people diagnosed with HIV in the UK and the many who do not know they are living with the illness. In 2010, the latest year for which UK statistics are available, 69,424 HIV-diagnosed persons (all ages) were seen for HIV care in the UK, representing an increase of 6% on the number seen in 2009 (65,292) and a 166% increase on the number seen in 2001 (26,088).

For the past five years the numerical year-on-year increase has been stable, at about 4,000 additional individuals seen for Hiv-related care each year. The total population aged 15-59 years, including those testing HIV positive anonymously and undiagnosed, living by the end of 2009 with HIV/AIDS in the United Kingdom is estimated at 80,800 (76,510-85,820), of whom 53,720 are males (50,610-58,000, or 67%) and the remaining 27,020 females (25,280-28,890), or 33%.[2]

1. Catholic Voices rightly and necessarily recognises the terrible impact of HIV on sub-Saharan Africa, but it implies a way of thinking that HIV and AIDS is a problem affecting other countries: something that is "over there", "not on our door-step", something "other" and "unseen" in our own daily lives. This follows a pattern in the way in which different thinkers have tackled the AIDS pandemic over the past 30 years. Early commentators like Randy Shilts remarked in his comprehensive survey of AIDS in America in the 1980s, how people thought and talked about AIDS almost exclusively in terms of an American, gay, male experience. Even the scientific community talked about "gay cancer and gay pneumonia...(and were) quite happy to keep the problem just that: gay." (And the Band Played On: P 104). This reflected the epidemiology of the pandemic in those early days. Now however, the focus of attention has shifted to new centres of crisis in the developing world. This is right and proper; but this does not mean that HIV and AIDS has gone from out midst. It is still here living with us in the UK today.

2. Prevention versus "care": Catholic Voices rightly rehearses the controversial debate about the use of condoms and campaigns of fidelity and abstinence in preventing the spread of the virus. But it focuses too much attention on this at the expense of how our Church can become a place of welcome for people already touched by HIV and AIDS: a place where people can be transformed by an embracing experience of acceptance, warmth, community and relationship. In the encyclical Salvifici Doloris (1984) Pope John Paul II identifies the parable of the Good Samaritan as a model for Christian action: the Good Samaritan is the social outcast who provides warmth and care for a wounded man without questions, without conditions, touching what is deemed "un-clean" because he knows this is what God desires.

The AIDS pandemic highlights profound social and religious dilemmas in our understanding of what it means to be a human being. HIV and AIDS is not simple and it both hurts and challenges our world in different ways. It asks us what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God, and to live in relationship with God and our fellow human beings. It highlights the complexity and fragility of our understanding of sex and gender; our ethical frameworks for the mediation of sexual behaviour; and it challenges us, again and again, to actively consider the way in which we care for the poor, the outcast, the oppressed, and the marginalised. Above all it invites the Church to be a place of warmth and welcome, acceptance and care, for the poor, the outcast, the oppressed and the marginalised; and to place itself squarely alongside the excluded, like the Good Samaritan.

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[1] Catholic Voices is described as 'the essential handbook for the apologist in the era of 24-hours news…to put the case for their faith.' A much fuller presentation of the complexity of issues involved will be found in Catholic Ethicists on HIV/AIDS Prevention, ed. Keenan, Fuller, Cahill & Kelly, Continuum 2000; or Ethics & AIDS, Kenneth R. Overberg SJ, Sheed & Ward Books 2006.

[2] UK Health Protection Agency, September 2011