February 1, 2004
AIDS ministers handle new pastoral challenges

Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Dan Lunney.

Dan Lunney, 36, studied in a Norbertine seminary before deciding that God was calling him to a different vocation—serving the pastoral needs of the sick and their families as a hospital chaplain. That led the Green Bay, Wis., native to his current position, as the second executive director of the National Catholic AIDS Network, an organization for those who minister to HIV/AIDS patients and their families, after time at the AIDS Pastoral Care Network and as a hospital pastoral care minister.

In addition to naming a new executive director, the 15-year-old network last year relocated its headquarters from San Francisco to Chicago. Now at the crossroads of America, the organization itself is at something of a crossroads as AIDS in the United Sta es has become less of front-page crisis and more of a chronic illness, at the same time more Americans are infected with HIV than ever before.

 

The Catholic New World: How is pastoral care for people living with HIV and AIDS different from pastoral care in general?

Dan Lunney: I got involved with the AIDS community in 1995. At that time, it was quite distinct. We didn’t have the cocktail therapies that are now available, with the protease inhibitors, which have extended people’s lives. At that time we were really facing HIV/AIDS being seen as a death sentence by many. The reports that we got, in many cases, were of someone who discovered they were HIV-positive and AIDS-diagnosed at the same time and would be in the dying process soon after that.

While I was at AIDS Pastoral Care Network, we went through the transition from dealing with people dying of AIDS to people who were living with HIV. The death rate from AIDS has decreased. At this point, it’s basically pastoral care for people living with a chronic disease. Fewer people are dying of AIDS-related causes, but the infection rate has continued to remain stable or even increase. What that means is that you have fewer people dying, but more people living with it. We’re at the highest number of people we’ve ever had living with it, and that will continue to rise.

 

TCNW: How many people in the United States are infected? And how much longer are they living?

DL: The estimate in the U.S. right now is 900,000 who are infected with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS).

As to how long, we’re still discovering that. The average person, without any medication, lives 10 years from the point of infection to AIDS diagnosis. A lot of people are surprised by that, because they’re used to hearing someone’s HIV infected, and then soon after that they’re AIDS-diagnosed. But a lot of that is because they’ve tested positive much after the point of infection.

 

TCNW: What pastoral care challenges does working with HIV/AIDS as a chronic disease bring?

DL: Helping people to live and live fully can be more challenging than helping people in the dying process. That might sound strange, but we haven’t dealt with chronic diseases in the same way we’ve dealt with terminal illnesses, so it’s a challenge to shift those gears. For example, we have hospice, which is a wonderful example of how to walk with people as they are going through the dying process, living as fully as possible until they die. We don’t have similar models for people with chronic diseases. Our health care system is not set up for people with chronic diseases, whether it be HIV/AIDS or congestive heart failure or any number of other diseases that are out there. They’re eventually fatal, but it’s hard to determine where that point is. Walking with people as they are facing the various challenges of living with a chronic disease, but who also have a lot of life in them—that’s the challenge.

The other challenge is that the stigma is still there with HIV/AIDS. I guess it’s similar to people with smoking. Just because we can find an easy cause doesn’t mean we can rest there. It’s much more complex than that, and I think we’re seeing that with the rise in infections among many different groups: African-Americans accounting for more than half the new infections, people of color in general are being disproportionately impacted.

That’s because of a number of different reasons. These aren’t things that are talked about in many cases, and when you have things that are in the dark, that’s just more chance for misunderstanding, people not making healthy choices, people not knowing what choices they have. That’s where the church can be an important model, play an important role of lifting this up and talking about it.

 

TCNW: What does the church bring in terms of ministry to people who have HIV/AIDS and their families? Why is it a church issue?

DL: One of the greatest things the church brings is Catholic social teaching. There’s a wealth of teaching that people are made in the image and likeness of God, and people are worthy of dignity. For us to operate from that is important. The church also talks about justice, the distribution of goods. If each of us is made in the image and likeness of God, and worthy of dignity inherent in that, then there are some rights that we have, and we need to respond accordingly.

When people aren’t afforded the access to health care, for example, that’s an affront to their dignity as a human person. We work both on the individual level of affirming people as made in the image and likeness of God and good, but also challenging the structures.

We’re very lucky here with Cardinal George, who has taken an active interest in HIV/AIDS, with his warm welcome to the network, and really wanting to keep HIV/AIDS on the agenda—we don’t find that everywhere.

 

TCNW: How do you keep the focus on HIV/AIDS now that it’s fallen off the front pages?

DL: That’s the challenge, countering the apathy, the idea that AIDS is not an issue anymore, the “isn’t AIDS solved?”

Many times the agenda is formed by what is the crisis of the day. If HIV/AIDS is not seen as a crisis, then why pay attention to it? It’s our challenge—we don’t want to go into the crisis mentality, because that can’t be maintained. But these are issues that we need to be dealing with and we need to be talking about and facing.

 

TCNW: How does NCAN make that happen going into the future?

DL: One of the areas that we’ve been addressing more concertedly is looking at ways to reach the youth. The youth initiative was started a few years back by Father Rodney (DeMartini, the network’s first executive director) working with CARA (Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate) on what young people see as their needs as far as HIV education goes, what do educators see as the challenges and needs, and what do parents see as the challenges and needs. That’s what the CARA report basically looked at. The national curriculum on HIV/AIDS put out by the NCEA was written 10 years ago, so what we’re doing is working with a roundtable of all the main people involved in Catholic education to establish new curriculum, look at the problems with teaching our youth about HIV/AIDS, teaching our youth about HIV/AIDS in a Catholic setting. Through this, what we’ve discovered is that some youths have no HIV/AIDS education, from school, from parents, from church, and so there’s a big void there. The church is the natural place to fill that. We can talk about HIV/AIDS from a more holistic perspective. We can include the values that are hard to do in a public school setting. We can equip the youth to face the issues that they’re going to face.

 

TCNW: Aren’t there people in the AIDS community who say you can’t equip the youth to deal with this, because you won’t talk about condoms or you won’t encourage the use of condoms?

DL: Our role as educators is to give youth information as well as to make sure they have a solid foundation in Catholic teaching. With that, there’s a high percentage of youth, according to statistics, who are engaging in sexual activity. That’s a given. There’s also a large number that state that if they had a choice in the matter, or if they would have thought it through, or if they had the tools, they would not engage in sexual activity. I don’t think it’s naïve to give youth the tools to abstain. It’s easy to throw condoms at HIV/AIDS, but that doesn’t solve the issue. Condoms have been here throughout the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and we still have the pandemic. Equipping people to make healthy choices in the long run does more to keep them healthy. … Public health includes condoms, but there’s a lot before that, a lot of ways we can equip our youth to respond in ways to keep them healthy.

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