05261
May 16, 2005

AIDS stigma kills, religious leaders are told

HIV-positive priest rues churches’
‘absolute fixation with sex’

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International

ATHENS — An Anglican priest who leads a network of African religious leaders who have tested positive for HIV has urged churches to end the “absolute fixation with sex” that stigmatizes those who live with the virus. 

     For many church leaders “AIDS equals sex, equals sin, equals death,” said the Rev. Johannes Petrus (Japé) Heath, coordinator of the African Network of Religious Leaders living with or personally affected by HIV/AIDS (ANERELA+). That attitude, he said, hampers efforts to check the spread of the pandemic.

     “The stigma keeps people from going to get tested (for HIV),” Heath told journalists covering the World Council of Churches meeting here. “The stigma keeps them from knowing their status.”

     Partly because of such attitudes, people are unwittingly spreading the virus, said Heath, an Anglican priest from Namibia, now based in South Africa, who tested positive for HIV during a routine medical examination in May 2003. 

     According to UNAIDS statistics, Africa accounts for 70 per cent of all the people living with HIV and AIDS. The United Nations agency has said that belief systems — secular, traditional and religious — help shape efforts to fight the pandemic. The success of such efforts may rest on whether HIV and AIDS “are viewed in a framework of transgression, stigma, and punishment, or of opportunities and risks,” he said. 

     However, many church leaders in Africa are judgmental in the way they look at HIV and AIDS, displaying an “exclusivist theology which is lived if not taught,” Heath said. This “absolute fixation with sex” leads to stigmatization, and religious leaders found to be HIV-positive are stigmatized most severely, he said.

     “When I first tested positive, I went into this deep loneliness,” he said. “It was only when I heard another priest ... say, ‘I am HIV-positive’ that I knew I wasn’t alone.”