Caritas Internationalis Meeting

Catholic organizations, according to the Vatican, provide about a quarter of the world’s health care to those living with HIV and AIDS. Representatives of many of the groups who provide that care were present at AIDS 2008. One, Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-sponsored confederation of some 200 national and local Catholic social service and development organizations, organized a get-together Tuesday evening at a local Catholic human rights center.

As I arrived, fashionably late, but still well before the evening’s events got under way (the traffic in Mexico City and the local phenomenon known as Mexican Standard Time meant we started almost an hour after we were supposed to), I was greeted by Father Robert J. Vitillo, the special adviser on HIV and AIDS to Caritas. He blanched when I introduced myself, but graciously welcomed me. I sat down with two people who had been at our session the previous day, “Good Catholics Use Condoms” who welcomed me warmly.

By the time we started with a prayer and introductions, more than 100 people had gathered to eat, drink and discuss how the conference was going and how their own work could be improved.
Guest speakers included the secretary general of the Young Women’s Christian Association, Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda, a Catholic from Zimbabwe who lost three siblings to HIV and AIDS and Sally Smith from the UNAIDS Civil Society Partnerships, who diplomatically noted that while UNAIDS and the Catholic hierarchy have some disagreements to work out, they must continue to forge ahead and collaborate as much as they can.

This quiet but implicit criticism of the Catholic hierarchy’s teachings against the use of condoms became on of the major themes of the evening, with several speakers expressing how upset they were that when the Catholic church was mentioned during the AIDS 2008 conference, it tended to be in a critical voice that ignored all the great work that Catholic organizations did. (The other focus was the creation of a network for Catholic groups that work in the field to communicate better.)

However, a Ghanaian priest and a Maryknoll sister from Central America, who ministers to sex workers, both seemed to question whether the hierarchy’s position on condoms and prevention was a viable one. The Ghanaian priest suggested the church needs to develop a theology of condomization as it related to HIV and AIDS.

While there were no explicit repudiations of these voices, Fr Vitillo and Monsignor Gabriel Penate (as bishops are called there) from Guatemala as well as other church officials brought the issue back to all the good work that Catholic organizations do with people living with HIV and AIDS. Fr Vitillo promised to follow up with everybody on the issue of a new network, and the evening drew to a cordial close.

DN