Death has become so much a part of life in southern Africa that church history professor Paul Gundani’s face barely bespoke loss as he rattled off the people in his family recently struck down by Aids.
”My sister last week, and my brother last year,” the 42-year-old Roman Catholic theologian said, as though he were lecturing to his class at the University of Zimbabwe. ”By now, my nephew may be dead, too.”
On the wall behind him, a poster read: ”Because the bishops ban condoms, innocent people die.”
It was not easy to have faith at the recently concluded 14th International Aids Conference.
The Roman Catholic Church – and to a lesser extent other world faiths and denominations – were criticised for failing to talk about the disease openly and preaching social mores that conference participants considered unrealistic or to be impeding efforts to stop the disease’s rampant spread in poor regions, especially Africa.
The disease has infected one in three people in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Swaziland, and one in five in South Africa.
But while some Protestant leaders conceded they have been slow to adapt to the grim realities of Aids and have been hypocritical about the clergy’s own sexual behaviour, they accused conference organisers of undervaluing their roles in caring for victims.
”The condom issue came up all the time,” said Raymond Martin of Christian Connections for International Health, adding that seminars and workshops often became ”religion-bashing” sessions.
”Some of this is warranted,” he conceded. ”But it’s only part of the reality. It’s often the local churches or religious communities who are caring for orphans and taking care of the dying.”
Martin added that programs teaching sexual restraint to youngsters have played a significant part in reducing infection rates in Uganda and other places.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, about 46% of Africans are Christian. Roman Catholics comprise 15% of the population and Protestants 10%.
Many at the meeting condemned Pope John Paul II’s refusal to budge from Roman Catholic bans on contraceptives and extramarital sex.
Francis Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice made reference to the sex scandals plaguing the church worldwide and asked, ”How can they be telling teenagers not to have sex?”
When youths from around the world appeared on the MTV cable television channel from Barcelona with former US President Bill Clinton, one of their key complaints was that religious leaders prevent them from getting condoms and information about the disease.
Clinton defended the church’s role in fighting the epidemic but said more candour is necessary.
”We need to tell people that if you engage in these behaviours this is the way you can stay alive,” he said.
Gundani, the Zimbabwean professor, accused the Vatican, which was not formally represented at the conference, of being ”totally oblivious of what’s happening on the ground. The bishops and priests in southern Africa are burying people every day.
”It’s graves and graves and graves.”
Many Protestant churches, especially in Africa, also have ”not lived up to the challenge that comes from Aids,” said Christophe Mann of the World Council of Churches.
But change is being forced by necessity as the disease closes in on men of the cloth, he said.
”They have to do a funeral every day of the week and they are running out of things to say at the funerals,” Mann said. ”They feel under pressure because they have it in their communities and their families. Even the clergy has Aids.”
The Rev. Canon Gideon Byamugisha is one of them.
The Anglican cleric from Uganda found out he was infected after his first wife died of Aids in 1991. Bishops pressured him to keep his infection a secret, but he eventually became the first priest in Africa to acknowledge having HIV.
”I decided there was no way I could be honest and Christian without saying I have it,” he said. ”Here you are, you have the mother of all problems, and when someone asks ‘How are you?’ I am supposed to say, ‘I am fine’?”
Byamugisha, now married to a woman whose previous husband died of Aids, is trying to convince clerics that their message must be: ”You should abstain, but if you are going to have sex, use a condom or have an HIV test or both.”
Even though the Aids crisis is hitting hardest in a region where religious beliefs are strong and sometimes a critical impediment to Aids programs, religion was not a prominent theme of the scientific seminars and political roundtables at the Barcelona meeting.
Christian clergy were rare among the 15 000 participants, as were Muslim clerics and Buddhist monks.
None of the major speeches or lectures dealt with faith’s role in the crisis.
Gundani warned that campaigns by secular Aids groups will be ignored without church backing in regions such as southern Africa.
”Faith is something that is very close to people’s lives,” he said. ”Their whole world view is religious.” – Sapa-AP