Hans was twenty-two. Except for a rather shabby greyish sheet, he lay naked on a double bed. His body was covered with large ugly black sores. I wondered if it was catching.

Earlier that evening I had been in my room, reading. I had been ordained about a year, it was 1984, and I had never even heard the word AIDS, though in fact three years had already gone by since, in Los Angeles, the first signs of a new viral infection had come to light. The telephone had rung, and a man called Carl, with a young voice, had asked if he were speaking to a priest. I had said I was. He had told me that his friend was dying. He himself was not a Catholic but his friend was. He had asked me to visit them.

At that time I was a curate in West London, at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Victories, Kensington. The Parish takes in the Earls Court area. Earls Court has a large homosexual population, and Hans and Carl were part of that community. I call it ‘a community’ because, in many ways, that is just what it is. Earls Court has many pubs and places where homosexual men can go, and there is a feeling of support and acceptance among them. In fact, there is something rather ‘cliquey’ about the place.

Carl, Hans and I did not begin a heated discussion about the rights and wrongs of homosexuality. There were far too many more urgent problems. Carl had given up his job so as to be at home to look after Hans. They had no money, little hope, and Carl was coming to the end of his tether.

What are the effects on moral theology of the arrival of the AIDS virus? In society as a whole, both in individuals and institutions, we could say that this virus has functioned as a ‘catalyst’, emphasising the reflexes, the ideologies, what is commonly shared and what is unspoken. In the Church as well, the stir has been significant, and we have more than once commented on the episcopal statements which have appeared in all the countries affected. The moral theologians have had to face questions from journalists, from colleagues or in their relationships with the Magisterium.

Besides the strong recommendation to become involved without discrimination in the care of people infected by the virus, a striking phenomenon in this stir is the widely-shared impression—widely shared inside as well as outside the Catholic Church—that a certain kind of moral language is not suitable for those who are in the most direct contact with AIDS: the sick or people who are HIV Positive, their families, those caring for them, those responsible for public health, the scientific researchers and the pastors themselves. This gap was evident even at the international level, at the 4th Conference on AIDs organised by the Vatican, which took place on the 13—15 November 1989. Some of the moral theologians appointed to speak from the platform left speechless the majority of the thousand participants—priests, religious, doctors, directors of institutions—who had assembled from all over the world.

There are a number of ways in which HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS, is transmitted, but still by far the most important worldwide and in particular in the West is sexual transmission. In America and Europe a major and growing route of infection is needle-sharing among drug abusers, but in the past, and still now, it has spread mainly, though far from exclusively, through homosexual contact between men. It is this sexual aspect of AIDS, and its connection with homosexuality, that has made it so controversial, and which has made it so problematic for the Church to find a proper response to it. So it is on AIDS, sex and the Church that I shall focus.

What is the proper attitude of the Church to AIDS? One thing to be said first of all is that the Church’s ministry is one of word and deed. As a body we seek both to proclaim the Gospel and to bring ordinary human comfort to those in need, whoever they may be. We not only preach, teach and defend a message; we also tend the sick, feed the hungry, visit those in prison, and so on. We lay before people the possibility of a fuller life and help them to share in the life that we ourselves have received. The two belong together; ours is a practical Gospel. We cannot, as Church, preach the commandments of Christ without being committed to obey them; we cannot preach his love for us and for all without letting that love reach others through us.

We see the AIDS epidemic first and foremost as exposing a crisis which goes beyond it and which emphasises how urgent and exacting is the challenge facing us all: the challenge to become, both personally and collectively, the subject—or subjects—of our own history.

In approaching this subject, clarification of the obscure relations between AIDS and the question of truth plays an indispensable part. That is why we desire to return to it by tackling it from the angle of the patient/practitioner relationship. This offers us the advantage of a concrete approach to the question of truth and AIDS without exempting us from facing the question at the deeper level of an analysis of our desire to control everything. Also it enables us to stress the close bonds which link this question of truth with that of deficiency.

The patient-practitioner relationship is a particular instance of human relationship in general. It also can be subjected to the same fundamental ethical analysis. As we have shown elsewhere, no true human relationship is possible if those involved do not fulfil the following three conditions: to be present to one another, to accept their differences in fact, and, above all, to cultivate their moral equivalence. But their moral equivalence would be denied by one lying about the other. Why, in fact, pretend to recognise another person as morally your equal if, by hiding the truth from that person, you seal him or her up in a lie?

’ “I’d shoot my son if he had AIDS”, says Vicar’, was a tabloid headline only four years ago. Thankfully, most Christians have moved on from that type of reaction. Nevertheless, the variety of Christian responses covers a wide spectrum of opinion and practice. In this respect Christians are no different from many other people in society. The Churches reflect and consolidate the values and mores of the society of which they are a part. The overall challenge for Christians facing HIV/AIDS, as well as many other contemporary issues, is how to be prophetic. This means not simply falling into a reactionary mould, but analysing what is happening in the pandemic of HIV, reflecting upon this reality and after much listening to people’s needs, discerning whether the Churches have anything valuable to say.

It is important to distinguish institutional Christian responses, reflected in official statements, and the action on the ground by Christians of all denominations. In some responses there is convergence of view, in others informed dissent from ‘official’ lines. It is also important to note the context within which the debates about pastoral responses to AIDS/HIV take place, for these touch on other lively issues such as the right to life, understanding drug use, sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. If society at large shows discomfort in dealing with these and some of the other major issues which AIDS raises, such as death and dying or the politics of health care, then it is hardly surprising that the Churches have been faltering in their first steps to respond.

We go on and on learning about AIDS. I first became aware of AIDS when I started reading the early press reports some ten years ago. Eventually I knew of people who were ill because of AIDS, I knew that lovers of friends of mine were ill, and in due course they died. I remember the very first time I saw the skin cancer Kaprosi Sarcoma: it was on the hand of a friend whom I was visiting in Amsterdam. I remember helping in 1987 to light over a thousand votive lights in the Dominican Priory Church at Oxford at an all-night vigil, to represent the current number of people in the United Kingdom known to be HIV Positive, and, of course, those candles also represented those who had died. My experience also included explaining how HIV infection is transmitted (and how it is not), talking about ‘safer sex’, and giving advice about the HIV test.

However, nearly two years ago I came to Edinburgh, and in my time there my experience of AIDS has broadened tremendously. I knew nothing about drug abuse whatsoever, although I knew that was how the HIV virus had been spreading so widely in Edinburgh, making it the worst-hit city in Britain after London. I had no idea how relevant my experiences of AIDS and of how it affected gay men in England would be. As it turned out, they were of great value. What, though, I was not prepared for was how AIDS affected children. Of course, gay men have parents and brothers and sisters and grandparents, all of whom are affected in one way or another when someone becomes HIV Positive.

Even though, as these years of AIDS go by, knowledge accumulates, experiences circulate and piles of books about the subject are written, nevertheless everybody seems to advance into an unknown territory, without maps or compass. Humanity has not got this landscape printed in its memory and each person who is HIV positive must rediscover for himself or herself how to cope with life and death, with time and with love, with the future, with sex, with money, in short with all those relations that human beings do not stop more or less consciously creating so that their lives have meaning, and which, among those that that the virus overtakes, are overthrown from top to bottom.

Often the man who is HIV Positive must live very much alone, so much is incommunicable. Moreover, he must often live with rejection and avoidance and fears—his own and others—in a society in which (to quote an observation of Olivier de Dinechin’s) it is many people’s opinion that ‘they brought it on themselves’ or even that ‘they have only got what they deserved’ ... whereas cancer is seen as a calamity and a heart-attack as almost an honour: ‘He worked too hard’. It is in a general silence or else censureship that some whole families are going into extinction, as Simon Robson describes in ‘Through the eye of a needle’. And, at least in some countries, to this rejection by public opinion very often is added exclusion from work, from one’s digs, from insurance coverage, from school ... the list goes on and on.