| Read our article by Jim McManus on the Douai Abbey Symposium. |
A symposium marking 21 years of the charity Catholics for Aids Prevention and Support (CAPS) and 20 years of their Christian HIV peer-support ministry, Positive Faith was held at Douai Abbey earlier this month.
At “Making Faith Sense of HIV”, participants were invited to reflect theologically on the meaning and significance of the Aids pandemic and the response of the Church over the past 40-plus years.
Among the HIV professionals attending were clinicians and the chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust. Five people, some of whom had been involved in Church ministry since the beginning of the HIV/Aids pandemic, and others who are more recently involved, gave presentations.
It followed an earlier symposium in London on 15 June on the power of peer support, aimed at the NHS and HIV sectors and promoting the value of our model of Christian peer support for people with HIV in this country.
The Douai Abbey symposium, with a more explicitly theological focus, comes amid a concern that the pastoral needs of people living with HIV are generally not understood and continue to be ignored within the wider Church. Among all the Continental reports for the upcoming Synod on Synodality in Rome, there is just one mention of people living with HIV, in the contribution from Oceania.
CAPS aims to help people living with HIV within the church, while also representing a Christian voice in the broader HIV sector. PositiveFaith members provide emotional, spiritual and practical support for each other, meeting in peer support groups and residential weekends.
Delegates in Douai reflected on the complex interplay between faith and HIV and the theological lessons that the churches can learn from the history of Christian responses to HIV. Presentations were given by CAPS’ chair Lazarus Mungure and pastoral support worker Abigail Chakanyuka. Other speakers included CAPS founder and LGBT advocate, Martin Pendergast and Sr Gill Horsfield MMS who ministered to people in Nairobi, Kenya at the height of the AIDS pandemic as well as Michael O’Halloran, former CAPS trustee.
The charity’s patron Timothy Radcliffe OP was scheduled to speak. He made his contribution by video after being called to Rome at short notice. There were also delegates from the secular HIV sector, including Richard Angell, chief executive Of the Terrence Higgins trust, the largest national UK HIV charity.
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