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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John Brooks, Director (773) 380-2958 or [log in to unmask]
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