Title: ELCA Presiding Bishop Addresses Session of International AIDS Conference ELCA NEWS SERVICE
August 17, 2006
ELCA Presiding Bishop Addresses Session of International AIDS Conference 06-125-FI
TORONTO (ELCA) -- The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Chicago, and president of the Lutheran World Federation, Geneva, addressed a session of the 2006 International AIDS Conference on Aug. 14. In response to HIV and AIDS, Christians are beginning to follow Jesus Christ into areas they would rather avoid, he said.
The panel discussion, "Religion and New Leadership: The Challenge to Deliver," included Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim representatives talking about the responses of their faith communities to the HIV and AIDS crisis. The Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance and World Conference of Religions for Peace sponsored the session.
In a news conference prior to the session, Hanson called on religious leaders to confront stigma and discrimination by taking HIV tests and publicly disclosing the results. "Religious leaders willing to be tested and make their status known is a huge first public testimony that will give courage to other religious leaders and also their communities to then follow, which begins to break the silence and the stigma too often associated in religious communities with HIV and AIDS," he said.
Hanson told reporters, "When it comes to a time to deliver for religious communities, I believe that there are at least four dimensions ... for us in religious leadership. It means first of all that we confess our complicity; second it means that we claim our capacity; third, it means that we name our responsibility; and fourth, that we submit to public accountability and transparency."
Asked about the roles of youth and young adults in the churches' response to HIV and AIDS, Hanson said the ELCA is following the lead of its young people. "They understand that if you're going to respond to HIV and AIDS, it needs to be with people who are living with HIV and AIDS -- not responding for them. They understand that this is a human rights issue. They understand that you can't address HIV and AIDS without addressing issues of poverty and stigmatization. They also understand that they must speak truth to power; they are willing to do that," he said. "They are exemplifying the leadership that needs to come from the whole religious community around HIV and AIDS."
In the public session Hanson said, "We have to do a searching inventory of our own behavior, attitudes and actions that have been complicit in the marginalization and stigmatization of people living with HIV and AIDS, rather than the full inclusion of people who are living with HIV and AIDS." That "soul searching" should be followed by "public confession and repentance" and a new look at faith traditions and texts as they apply to people who are living with HIV and AIDS, he said.
"It's interesting that most of our sacred texts compel us to stand with those who are suffering, to have mercy rather than to marginalize, to empower rather than to stigmatize, and yet somehow those prevailing themes of most of our sacred texts, religious traditions and beliefs have become secondary in shaping our life with those who are living with HIV and AIDS," he said.
"As a Christian, Jesus is always going to lead me to stand alongside someone whom I would prefer to avoid and often probably stigmatize. And Jesus says, 'There God is present and, if you want to be present where God is present in the world, you'd better be standing there.' That kind of courage is what is being called for and what is being seen in religious communities often today throughout the world," Hanson said.
Hanson admitted that religious communities have played a part in stigmatizing and marginalizing people living with HIV and AIDS.
"We have been complicit by our silence. We have been complicit by our shaming words and deeds. We have been complicit by the way we framed the moral debate. We have been complicit by our perpetuating and participating in systems of violence, particularly violence against women. We have been complicit by our failure to listen, to walk with, to learn from and follow the leadership of people living with HIV and AIDS," he said.
Hanson asked faith communities to become places of "moral formation and deliberation" on issues related to HIV and AIDS, to collaborate with other faith groups and to work together with the public and private sectors.
Safe sex must be a safe topic in religious communities, "if we are going to be safe places for people to talk openly about sexuality and safe places where people living with HIV and AIDS are full members of the community," Hanson said. "We need to get rid of the word 'them' and 'those people' and use only the word 'us,' because the church, religious communities are living with HIV and AIDS," he said.
Distrust among religious communities and the pursuit of their own self-interests have diminished their capacity to work together, Hanson said. "We have to look to dying to our own self- interests for the sake of living for and living with people who are living with HIV and AIDS," he said.
Hanson called for a "three-legged stool" response to HIV and AIDS. "This cannot be a task the religious communities take on singularly. We need to be the third leg in the response stool with civil society in the public realm and in the private sector," he said.
"We have to mobilize people to hold elected officials accountable even as we need to be expected to be held accountable as religious leaders, which is going to mean creating tension in the religious community, not just alleviating it," Hanson said. "Tension will be necessary if there is going to be long-term change," he said.
Speakers other than Hanson were Phramaha Boonchuay Doojai, director of the Chiang Mai Buddhist College, Thailand; Professor Farid Esack, Harvard University, founder of the South African organization Positive Muslims; Dulce Miosotis Alejo Espinal of the Independent Evangelical Baptist Mission, representing the International Community of Women Living with HIV and AIDS, Dominican Republic; Bishnu Ghimire of the South Asia Interfaith Council, Nepal; and the Rev. Jape Heath, secretary general of the African Network of Religious Leaders living with or positively affected by HIV or AIDS (ANERELA+), South Africa.
High-Level Consultation on HIV and AIDS and Women and Girls
Hours before the International AIDS Conference opened Aug. 13, Hanson took part in a high-level consultation on women and girls convened by both the United Nations and the Canadian government. The consultation involved representatives of governments, especially ministers of health and others with responsibility for their governments' responses to HIV and AIDS. It also involved representatives of nongovernmental organizations and faith-based organizations.
"There's a growing recognition that the number of HIV and AIDS cases is rapidly increasing among women and girls, and they have less access to treatment education," Hanson said. Women are not often included at tables where decisions are being made about funding priorities and distribution methods, he said.
Women and girls are marginalized "through patriarchal structures of society, through poverty and through domestic violence," Hanson said, and those are all factors interwoven through the HIV and AIDS crisis. "The response needs to be a holistic response," he said.
Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway closed the high-level consultation with a final reflection that summarized many of the issues they discussed, Hanson said. He said the princess identified the issues as "gender equality and the power of women -- the power of women to make decisions about their own sexual health, the power of women to educate and be educated, the power of women to be at tables of decision-making."
Rick Warren, pastor and best-selling author of the "Purpose Driven" book series, noted that in most communities in the world -- rural villages, small towns, suburban neighborhoods or metropolitan cities -- people gather in religious communities, Hanson said, adding, "In those religious communities are women who gather to worship, to pray, to lead, to learn."
"Those communities of faith are centers of empowering women," Hanson said. They can also be points of distribution for "both educational materials and the needed health intervention responses," he said.
"We have gathered here as religious leaders to renew our commitment. Part of that commitment is that we will seek to create communities and environments where women are fully included, as we together respond to the HIV and AIDS crisis in the world," Hanson said.
International AIDS Society, an independent association of HIV professionals with more than 7,000 members from 153 countries, holds the International AIDS Conference every other year. More than 24,000 researchers, advocates, politicians and celebrities are here from 132 countries for the 2006 conference, with the theme, "Time to Deliver." The conference concludes Aug. 18. -- -- --
Information about the 2006 International AIDS Conference and ecumenical and interfaith pre-conferences is at http://iac.e- alliance.ch/ on the Web.
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