Workers Say Even after Decades, AIDS Continues to Challenge Church. 28/7/10

"Behavior change is possible, but I'd like to see it happen on a deeper level"

VIENNA (CNS) -- After three decades in which the AIDS pandemic has ravaged lives and communities around the globe, those struggling against the disease at the grass roots say AIDS continues to present difficult challenges to the Catholic Church. "AIDS is challenging the church to look once again at the life of Jesus, who was constantly on the margins of society, bringing people at the margins back to the center," U.S. Maryknoll Father Richard Bauer told Catholic News Service.

"Many of the new HIV infections are found among the most marginalized people, so our response to the Gospel today isn't to reach out to the tax collector and leper, but rather to the (intravenous) drug user in the Ukraine or the woman in commercial sex work who's being trafficked. They are calling the church to no longer be comfortable only in parish settings. We've got to go to the margins as Jesus did," said Father Bauer, executive director of Catholic AIDS Action, a program of the Namibian bishops' conference.

The church has preached behavior change as a prevention method for AIDS, and a nun who works with trafficked women in Eastern Europe said that message can have larger implications.

"Behavior change is possible, but I'd like to see it happen on a deeper level, more than just as a response to HIV and AIDS. If women could have greater say in matters related to their own sexuality, and a greater say in how they create their relationships and get out of a vicious circle of poverty, dependency, abuse and disease, we can accomplish a lot," Sister Silke Mallmann, a member of the Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood, told CNS. "Often to our ears behavior change sounds restrictive, a list of the things we're no longer allowed to do. But if you formulate it differently, it can be very empowering."