Journeying Together: HIV, Faith & a Synodal Church
Journeying Together: HIV, Faith & a Synodal Church
By Martin Pendergast
The early 1980’s saw steps towards more honest approaches to gender and sexuality in wider society as well as in the Churches, following the 1967 decriminalisation of homosexuality, and more open perspectives about reproductive health issues. This was part of the context in which a new global health phenomenon came to be identified: severe immune suppression often resulting in previously rare cancers, respiratory infections, and brain impairment. It was around 1981 that the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus, HIV, came to be identified in the USA and France.
Primarily affecting gay men, injecting drug-users, and those who had received infected blood products, the HIV pandemic prompted panicked responses in many sections of society, not least among faith communities. Some of us from a range of Christian traditions saw this as a wake-up call, a new ‘sign of the times’ to be addressed. It caused us to revisit how we reflected and acted in the face of death and dying, sexuality and gender, racism, discrimination, and other systemic inequalities.
We began to recognise that this was not about personal vulnerabilities but that the Body of Christ had AIDS. This corporate ecclesial reality challenged our communities to move beyond individualistic responses to realise that we had to link together to confront and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. While ecumenical networks were developed, a number of us in ministerial or professional contexts came to be aware of many Catholics working in the HIV field as well as many Catholics living with HIV and related illnesses. So was formed Catholic AIDS Link (CAL) in the mid 1980’s and a journey of mutual support began.
As medical research progressed and new treatments, albeit neither cures nor vaccines, were developed, some misguidedly read the ‘signs of the times’ in the 1990’s and decided that it was all over: HIV & AIDS had gone away. The focus shifted from terminal care to enabling those living with HIV to live well, to engage fully in all that life and work could offer, and to respond to the migrant communities then arriving in the UK from heavily HIV-impacted countries, often without knowing their HIV status.
As people were able to create their own systems of care and peer-support, the need for honest prevention strategies was crucial. Yet here was a sticking point for the Catholic community. From journeying together in a common venture, divisions began to emerge. The needs of mothers and babies were pitted against those of drug-users and men who had sex with men. An HIV synodality, listening and walking together, was in danger of sinking into a divisive, scapegoating of ‘victims’, the worthy and innocent against those perceived to be responsible for their own ‘downfall’.
Some of us refused to be actors in this game of violence. We claimed, again, not just the right but the responsibility to read ‘the signs of the times’ within the context of our Christian faith and Catholic tradition. We upheld the moral responsibility to promote effective HIV prevention strategies and encouraged a re-reading of the Church’s teaching and pastoral practice in relation to gender, sexuality, and same-sex relationships. We enabled members of the Church’s hierarchy to hear the stories and experiences of those living with HIV, not only to be alongside and empower them, but more importantly to value the gifts that people with HIV and all the affected communities, including those caring and ministering, brought to the Church and society. These developments, leading to the formation of Catholics for AIDS Prevention & Support (CAPS), are thoroughly documented in CAPS Director, Vincent Manning’s doctoral thesis, Encountering Christ Through the Passion of HIV: an Inquiry into the Theological Meaning of HIV in the Church (https://research.stmarys.ac.uk/id/eprint/3511/). Historic documentation from CAL and CAPS now form part of the Welcome Institute’s HIV Archive.
These early steps sought to counter the Church’s own paralysing syndrome - AFRAIDS: Acute Fear Regarding AIDS. The acronym was first coined by Fr. Bill Kirkpatrick, one of the first Anglican priests to throw himself into HIV ministry. Not only did AIDS paralyse people with fear as a result of myths and misconceptions, it also led to indiscriminate fear of people with HIV/AIDS, prejudice and even violation of basic human rights such as the right to privacy and confidentiality, or the right to found a family. It could prevent the people of God from responding to the call of the Gospel to serve, to heal, to liberate, following the pattern of Jesus’ own ministry.
It sometimes meant that bishops were afraid to speak or act because they were unsure of people’s responses. At the same time, people with HIV/AIDS and those who stood by them, were often afraid to begin the dialogue which would lead to the Church’s corporate response of care, compassion, sensitivity and justice. AIDS ultimately called our bluff as Christians.
Church leaders around the world realised their need to listen to the experience of their people and found that in this new area of the Church’s ministry, the lead was often already being given by the laity. Faced with the social, scientific and personal complexities and dilemmas of the AIDS crisis, pastors recognised in this sign of our times an area where the laity had a special claim to expertise. The demands of justice meant that the Church could not avoid the difficult questions raised by this phenomenon.
Listening to the real needs of people in this situation was a pre-requisite for speaking out. Listening led to recognition, understanding, and affirmation of our common mission. The time was now overdue for all of us in the Church in Britain to discover these gifts in our dealings with each other and with those with HIV/AIDS who daily called the Church to repentant service.
Cardinal Basil Hume was unafraid to face the challenge. He engaged with Frontliners, a peer-support and activist group of people living with AIDS, many of them among the first to be so diagnosed. leading to his covering rental costs for their office premises at London’s Notre Dame de France Church, Leicester Square. One of their members, Peter Larkin, a founder-member of Catholic AIDS Link was a key motivator in this relationship with the Cardinal.
Peter had been a CAL delegate to the first Vatican AIDS Conference in 1989. It was at this Conference that another CAL delegate, Fr. John White, also living with HIV, unfurled a banner proclaiming: The Body of Christ Has AIDS. Peter remonstrated with Curial officials when they questioned his AIDS diagnosis, and not being allowed to speak on the Conference floor, demanded to speak with Pope St. John Paul II. Peter was visited by Cardinal Hume towards the end of his life, and after Peter died early in 1990, the Cardinal celebrated a Memorial Mass in Westminster Cathedral Crypt for Peter and his partner George who had died shortly after.
Cardinal Hume’s public responses provide an example of a shift from moralising about HIV and a concern to be clear about what is right and what is wrong, to the priority of compassion for those who suffer; and secondly, an increasing awareness that the pandemic challenged doctrinal certainties, in such a way that even to speak of sin was of no help in the face of human suffering.
In Cardinal Hume’s address to a 1994 CAL Conference, the theological language and emphasis is striking. He stated: “our starting point has to be the Gospel imperative to help those in need … So the Christian response...should be to reach out and offer practical help … the judgement (Matthew 26) is of the heart not the head. It is about how people have lived, about deeds rather than words.”.
Even allowing for the audience of activists, pastoral volunteers and directly HIV-affected Christians, there appears to me to have been a significant change of theological tone. Not once did the Cardinal mention sin, except by implication in regard to the judgement that will be made upon the Church for any failure to respond to those in need.
The theological direction of learning from the phenomenon of AIDS in society has been reversed, he suggested: “In developing an informed and sensitive response to the needs of people with HIV or AIDS the Church needs your experience, your commitment and your spirituality. Above all the Church needs the witness and gifts of those women, men and children who live with the daily impact of HIV or AIDS.”.
The synodal journey of enabling the Church to live positively with HIV has also been a time of grace in the lives of many of those directly affected, as well as for those who seek to be alongside. We were doing synodality long before the term came into current use. For many of us this solidarity has been one of the greatest privileges. With their experience of rejection, isolation and closeness to an awful death, people living with HIV shared more closely than many of us, what Christ experienced in his Passion.
Many of us came to serve but found ourselves being served; we came expecting to pray for their healing or to offer support and yet discovered our own need of healing and receiving from them, so that the greatest blessing has been finding and coming to know Christ in people who are living with HIV and AIDS. This is the kind of outcome that ministry in a synodal Church entails.
Once again we are challenged with a dynamic concept of ministry - that it is in ministering that we are ministered to. For those working alongside people living with HIV, the greatest gift has been the realisation that what Christ asks is whether we are willing to be ministered to by him where He chooses, rather than where we might have decided to encounter him.
If we truly believe in the Word made flesh and are willing to recognise it in our lives and the lives of those around us, the old adage, ‘hate the sin but love the sinner ’ becomes a blasphemy. It is in the face of the person themselves that Christ is revealed to us in flesh and blood: not looking through the face, ignoring it and pretending that it is an imagined Christ alone before us, but seeing the broken Christ, the blasphemed Christ, the rejected Christ in the face of that particular person at that particular time.
In looking through and beyond the vulnerable faces in front of us we are likely to miss the risen Christ calling us to become a welcoming, inclusive Church, where grace-filled reality can be encountered in, and ministered by, those who, too often, are kept or remain on the periphery of Church and society.
Martin Pendergast STL, MA, MSW, was a co-founder of Catholic AIDS Link (CAL) & Catholics for AIDS Prevention and Support (CAPS). He was responsible for commissioning HIV, Drugs & Sexual Health NHS Services in the 1990’s and was a Trustee and Chair of the national charity, NAM-AIDSMAP. He was a founding member of LGBT+ Catholics Westminster. He is a member of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. He now chairs the Theological Committee of the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics. A longer version of this article was first published in ‘The Pastoral Review’, October 2023.