AIDS and the Catholic Church :: HIV Religion Christianity Essays

AIDS and the Catholic church building serviceAs the AIDS epidemic in the United States advanced into the 1990s, it became clear that AIDS had a spic-and-span target race. AIDS was no longer strictly a intrepid disease but was leaking into the general heterosexual population as well. Moreover, as the decade progressed, new cases of HIV infection were being increasingly set in poor, minority communities. While the focus of the AIDS epidemic shifted from the high-profile masculine homosexual population to poor, minority communities, political activism and pecuniary support for the fight against AIDS also began to decline. With the new limitations set by decreased universal support and decreased financial imaginations, policy-makers, humanitarian organizations, and AIDS activists began to analyze how opera hat to extend AIDS-related resources to these new target populations.The US Hispanic community is one and only(a) such population for which new methods of AIDS programming i s being sought. Hispanics hold 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 center 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 wanting 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 apparent that support for combating the spread of AIDS within the Hispanic population must(prenominal) come from an outside third party.Few institutions are in as ideal a position as the Catholic Church to care 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 and 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 subject Catholic AIDS Network, was established in 1989 as a resource for all catholic communities dealing with the struggle against AIDS.