Priest uses similar strategies to raise awareness about AIDS, poverty

Published: 2005-01-31

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- In some ways the world has made a lot of progress in confronting the problem of HIV and AIDS since Father Robert J. Vitillo first began working on the issue in 1987. "In the 1980s, even in hospitals, people were suiting up like they were going into outer space to care for a person with AIDS," said the executive director of the U.S. bishops' Catholic Campaign for Human Development, who is preparing to take up the AIDS issue on a full-time basis once again. "There was a lot of irrational fear of casual infection." But despite better education about AIDS and HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes it, and great strides in finding antiretroviral drug combinations that help people with AIDS live longer, there is little progress toward a cure and people with HIV and AIDS still face "a great deal of fear and stigma and discrimination," said Father Vitillo. The Catholic Church has been "a loud voice against" such discrimination, and has also been a major player in hands-on health care and education on HIV/AIDS in developing countries, he added. Father Vitillo, a priest of the Diocese of Paterson, N.J., hopes to bring more of that experience into the work of international organizations based in Geneva in his new job as full-time special adviser on HIV and AIDS to Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-based confederation of national Catholic charities organizations in 160 countries.

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