New report out with Catholics for Choice (pdf):
In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, recalls Calle Almedal, a longtime HIV/AIDS advocate, Catholic hospitals and other institutions which were mainly staffed by nuns were the only ones that would treat patients dying of AIDS. From New York City to Uganda, as AIDS victims were shunned by hospitals and left to die at home, often the only facilities that would take them in were Catholic.
It reminds Almedal, a gay man and a Catholic who has worked at the intersection of faith-based organizations and AIDS for more than a decade, of an encounter in 1986 with an Irish nun who worked in a Catholic hospital. “She looked at me with her very blue eyes and said, ‘Mr. Almedal, do you think that condoms are the only solution?’ I said no, and she looked at me and said, ‘Nor do I.’ The nun and her staff were distributing condoms. And they were talking about abstinence.”
This disconnect between talk and action that stands out in Almedal’s mind has long characterized faith-based work on HIV/AIDS, as religious groups working in the field part ways with the strictures of their traditions and hierarchies, and in recent years the mandates of conservative American funders, in order to deliver potentially life-saving resources to populations most vulnerable to the disease.
“The doctrine is there, but then you have the pastoral care, which is about the reality that people live in,” Almedal says. “And that’s where those nuns were – out there in reality, and they gave realistic advice to people.”
But the principled duplicity of these private acts of resistance seems, in recent years, to have hardened into a new status quo when it comes to partnerships between US and even international funding organizations – meant to be part of the “evidence-based community” – and the conservative FBOs that proudly are not. After six years of billions of dollars of conditional HIV/AIDS funding from the US PEPFAR program, the landscape for FBOs and HIV is incontrovertibly altered, and not all for the good. With rising HIV rates – thanks to abstinence-only education in Africa – and an apparent (and possibly related) spike in anti-gay campaigns across the continent, the global AIDS community might be witnessing a new phase of the old equation: that silence, even silent dissent, can equal death.
Read all … (pdf)
