According to UN statistics, over 22 million people in Africa are infected with HIV. This comprises 67 per cent of the world’s population of HIV infected persons. The majority of these persons are in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2002, Canadian Jesuit Fr Michael Czerny founded the African Jesuit AIDS Network based in Nairobi, Kenya, as a way to help Jesuits in Africa address the problem of HIV and AIDS.
Worldwide, the Catholic Church is the major caregiver for those who are HIV positive and those who are suffering from AIDS as well as also caring for those affected – especially widows, orphans and others who are carrying the burden, according to Fr Czerny.
“If you look at it medically, perhaps worldwide, the Church offers 25 per cent of AIDS services,” he said.
“My guess is that the average in Africa is closer to 40 per cent, maybe even 50 per cent. The further away you get from the big cities, the closer it gets to 100 per cent. Often, the only AIDS services in the remote areas are the Church clinics.
“Since HIV and AIDS is not only a sickness but also an enormous cultural, personal, family, social and spiritual problem, what the Church can do, and what I think we can be proud of as a Church, is that we address the whole person and not just the infection – not just the medical part. “So an HIV positive person can look to the Church for a wide range of care and support which can be summed up as being accepted as a person and encouraged to continue to live as fully as possible, as long as possible, and not to allow HIV/AIDS to be a death sentence.
“I think many Africans would say: ‘The Church was with us before AIDS. The Church is now generously with us during AIDS and the Church will be with us after AIDS’.
“In that sense, the Church is not seen so much as a service provider but as that reality which we call ‘Mother’: The mother who is there and has always been there and will be there as long as she is needed.
“The Church in Africa calls herself the family of God in Africa; that is the definition coming from the first Synod on Africa and so I would say that basically the Church deals with HIV and AIDS as a family. We try to make everyone feel that they are part of a family, whether they are in need of care or whether they are in a position to offer some kind of care.
“We base our work on a story from Matthew’s Gospel (8:3). There was a leper who dared to approach Jesus – which in itself was against the law – and he challenged Him, saying: ‘If you want to, you can heal me’ and Jesus did two things. He said: ‘I want to’ and He reached out and touched him and healed him. In this very short scene, we have many dimensions of AIDS care, of true pastoral ministry.
“The first: ‘Of course I want to’, is this readiness to help. Someone who is in deep trouble and very upset, and perhaps very cruelly rejected by everyone on whom he has ever counted, can turn to the Church and know that there will be a positive response. There will be no judgement. There will be no calculation and the answer is, ‘of course we want to’. Secondly, we reach out and touch. I think it’s the most fundamental gesture in response to AIDS.
“A person who has, especially in recent times, heard they have an HIV positive diagnosis, feels as good as dead – they feel inhuman and unfortunately society, culture and sometimes even family, will treat that person as dead. When we reach out and touch that person, that’s when they will say: ‘When I first found out that I was HIV positive I was dead and now I feel alive’. And some people will even go further and say: ‘Before I became positive I was wasting my life. I was throwing my life away by my misbehaviour. Now, unfortunately, I’m HIV positive, but now I’m really living and I’m living my life responsibly for my family and for others’.
“Statistics bear out the fact that the wide distribution of condoms as a prevention strategy does not succeed. It does not bring down the rate, and this is what the Holy Father said. He didn’t deny that a condom might be useful sometimes. What he denied was that the promotion of condoms, as a primary prevention strategy, does not succeed. It does not achieve its objective. It does not bring down the average rate of HIV in the population. But people became very agitated because they didn’t listen carefully to what he said and because they were not well informed and because there was a lot of ideology, emotion and interest behind this whole issue, and so there was a lot of controversy.”
Dr Edward Green, then Director of the Harvard AIDS Prevention Research Project, said: “As a scientist, I was amazed to see the closeness between what the Pope said in Cameroon and the results of the most recent scientific discoveries. The condom does not prevent AIDS; only responsible sexual behaviour can address the pandemic. There is a gap between what is now considered normal or acceptable in globalised culture: the culture of media, of advertising, of marketing. Those values are in sharp tension with traditional Catholic values and with traditional African values.
“Perhaps we could sum up the cultural value of globalised culture regarding sexuality, as the reliance – and I would say the promotion – of the idea of mutual consent. That is to say that the norm for sexual behaviour is the consent of the two participants and as long as the two participants are beyond the minimum age and freely consent, then there is no other norm to be applied.
“The idea that we have in the Church and the idea that we have in Africa is that there are other norms and those norms don’t depend only on you and me: they depend on our family, they depend on our community, they depend on our parish, they depend on our nation, maybe even on our tribe.
“That idea is in opposition because in Africa, and in traditional Catholic morality, it’s not just what you and I agree on that makes it right; there are other norms and those norms in fact are meant to orient what you and I will do, or not do, at certain moments in our lives with certain persons.
“There, the difference is very sharp. It wasn’t talked about in connection with the controversy, but I’m quite sure that is the real issue; that the Pope represents a set of norms about sexuality that we don’t want to accept because they are more demanding. They are also more life giving and produce more happiness. But in the short run they seem to be more demanding than simply two of us agreeing on what we want to do.
“This is the road to greater happiness, the greater good. We say this not because we thought of it yesterday, but because this has been our experience and this has been the experience of every serious culture; that sexuality is a great gift, a wonderful thing which, in order to be appreciated and used properly, requires discipline, the recognition that everything is not always possible.
“This is a long-standing human wisdom but it goes against the principles of entertainment and marketing and so we’re having a conflict.
“The massive promotion of condoms is a destruction. It’s not meeting the problem and it’s not helping, but unfortunately it is not the only example of wrong-headed approaches imposed on Africa.
“Africa has survived other mistaken policies and it will survive this one also. But my hope is that with the kind of teaching the Holy Father has given, we will make progress and progress consists, secondarily, in improved statistics. The real success is when young people are able to live their sexuality more responsibly. When married couples live their sexuality more responsibly, and where the family of God faces AIDS as a family – that is a sign of God at work in Africa.”
Iinterview by Mark Riedemann for Where God Weeps, a weekly television and radio show produced by Catholic Radio and Television Network in conjunction with the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need.