Abstract
“The body of Christ has AIDS” is the provocative title of a 1995 song by the group the Christian Left. The song allegorizes Jesus’ sufferings with that of people living with and dying of AIDS. Several years after the song’s release, its title was splashed across a billboard by a Catholic diocese in the UK in an attempt to draw attention to the fact that the Church had not been sufficiently attuned to the challenges faced by those marked by the stigma and discrimination that came with being HIV positive, and to the need for the Church in that region and indeed in the whole of the UK to begin paying attention to the concerns of Christians infected with and affected by HIV. Subsequently, the slogan “the body of Christ has AIDS” has become a rallying cry for Christian activists seeking to reflect, through the lenses of their faith, on what HIV and AIDS mean for the believing community and the rest of the world. By drawing attention to the double torments of social exclusion and moral condemnation associated with HIV, the words remind us of the physical and emotional distress that is part of the experience of living with the virus. Despite their pain, however, those living with or affected by HIV, because they resemble Christianity’s “divine Founder who was persecuted, calumniated and tortured” (Pius XII 1943, §3), offer the Church a wonderful opportunity to discover one side of its true face, that of suffering.
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© 2012 Anna Kasafi Perkins, Donald Chambers, Jacqueline Porter
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Lewis, R.A. (2012). From Dogma to Pastoral Compassion: A Response to A Statement of the Antilles Episcopal Conference on HIV-AIDS . In: Perkins, A.K., Chambers, D., Porter, J. (eds) Justice and Peace in a Renewed Caribbean: Contemporary Catholic Reflections. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032461_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032461_13
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