AIDS and the Catholic Church

AIDS and the Catholic Church

As the AIDS epidemic in the United States advanced into the 1990s, it became clear that AIDS had a new target population. AIDS was no longer strictly a gay disease but was leaking into the general heterosexual population as well. Moreover, as the decade progressed, new cases of HIV infection were being increasingly identified in poor, minority communities. While the focus of the AIDS epidemic shifted from the high-profile male homosexual population to poor, minority communities, political activism and financial support for the fight against AIDS also began to decline. With the new limitations set by decreased public support and decreased financial resources, policy-makers, humanitarian organizations, and AIDS activists began to analyze how best to extend AIDS-related resources to these new target populations.

The US Hispanic community is one such population for which new methods of AIDS programming is being sought. Hispanics comprise a rapidly growing portion of the US minority population but are still over-represented among new cases of HIV infection. According to the CDC, "In 2000, Hispanics represented 13% of the US population (including residents of Puerto Rico), but accounted for 19% of the total number of new US AIDS cases reported that year (8,173 of 42,156 cases)" (CDC 1). In contrast to the gay male communities of San Francisco and New York in the 1980s, Hispanics are lacking the financial resources to combat the spread of AIDS in their communities. As a matter of fact, the Hispanic poverty rate of 20% given by the US Census Bureau is about three times that of caucasians. Thus, it is likely that support for combating the spread of AIDS within the Hispanic population must come from an outside third party.

Few institutions are in as ideal a position as the Catholic Church to address the AIDS epidemic in the US Hispanic community. A statistic from The Catholic Almanac says that 80% of US Hispanics are catholic, and hence the Catholic Church has a very influential presence in the Hispanic community. As a community-based institution with international backing, a catholic community church can draw on the resources of its arch-diocese to address community-specific issues. Therefore, an AIDS campaign disseminated through the catholic church would not necessarily rely on the financial support of those communities it benefits most -- namely poor, Hispanic communities. Such a campaign, the National Catholic AIDS Network, was established in 1989 as a resource for all catholic communities dealing with the struggle against AIDS.