Congregation of Christian Brothers.
Pan-Africa Province: Conference on HIV/AIDS

Nairobi Aug 28 – Sept 3 2006.

Key note address: Br Richard Walsh, Province leader.

My dear Brothers,

I welcome you to this province Conference on HIV/AIDS.

One hundred and seventy four years ago a cholera plague engulfed Ireland with particularly devastating effects on the poor where sanitary conditions were extremely primitive and where food and nutrition were of inferior quality.

Of the 115 people who caught the disease in Kilkenny only 11 recovered.

Hospitals were unable to cope with the emergency.

Our beloved Founder, Edmund Rice, who was still Congregation Leader directed that the Brothers help as far as possible and make their premises available if necessary.

In Thurles and Dungarvan the school and Brothers' houses were vacated for use of cholera victims. In Limerick the newly built Sexton St school was given over while rooms in the house were made available for chaplains, doctors and nurses. In that school, which had become a hospital, were 525 patients over a period of 6 months. 225 of the 525 died. In the mornings the Brothers, on the short walk from house to the school building often had to step over as many as 14 or 15 bodies of the victims who had died during the night.

Edmund Rice himself wrote to the Brothers as follows:

Our Limerick Brothers are attending to the poor cholera patients in the hospitals. They give a frightful account of the ravages it is making there, sixteen dead in their school in one morning.

A pupil of the school who later became a Brother wrote:

All day long the Brothers were to be seen at the bedside of the sufferers, attending every call, soothing every pang, using every means possible to keep down the burning fever or to ease the agony of the tortured limbs. The night also found them at their posts, the silence of which was only broken by the cries of the patients calling aloud for the Brothers by their names as their very presence seemed to have a soothing effect.

Brothers, Edmund Rice and the early Brothers responded bravely and practically in meeting the devastating reality of the cholera plague in the 1830s in a manner that suited the need and the times.

We are here this week to consider the catastrophic reality of HIV/AIDS as it affects Africa here and now, in our time and in our place and to consider what are the needs thrown up by HIV and AIDS to which we can respond in an appropriate and effective manner.

During this week we are called to hear anew, to receive anew, to listen anew to the reality of so many of our brothers and sisters.

As much as with the ear of the brain, we are also to hear with the ear of the heart since it is the heart that will move us. It is when we see the faces of HIV/AIDS sufferers and know their names and their story and look into their eyes that we ourselves will be transformed in such a way that we will be moved from the depth of our humanity to respond.

During this week I urge you to discover and welcome innovative ideas, seeing them as signs of the spirit; signs of vitality and hope. Brothers, I invite you to be imaginative and creative; to be poetic and prophetic; to be bold and daring; passionate and committed; enthusiastic and embracing of risk.

I invite you to think 'outside the box'.

At this time we are charged with developing a new Brotherhood that is truly African and a sign of the reign of God in this place. We truly are about new beginnings with Edmund.

Our history has called us to growth through our fragility. Some of our congregational fragility has come to us from circumstances and realities we would not wish to invite or repeat, but can we adopt an attitude of inviting fragility and embracing it, confident that growth comes through it? The fragility that comes from taking steps in the dark; of embarking on new and untried adventures into new and frightening places?

Can we cast aside the deadening temptation to have everything so guaranteed of success that initiative and passion become strangled at birth?

Can we welcome a fragility that throws us back onto relying on each other in community and onto God in prayer arising from the poverty of which our fragility makes us all too aware?

Can we truly immerse ourselves in the love that struggles to cast out fear?

Fear paralyses. It reduces our capacity to risk and moves us to seek secure positions. It moves us to become traditional, conservative -- closed to renewal and innovation.

Brothers this conference has not been convened to canonise the status quo.
This conference is not merely about the sharing of existing practices and initiatives, though this sharing also has its place.

This conference has the potential to reform and reshape our lives and our Province if we are willing to be decisive and to make proposals that help transform, re-structure and re-think our concrete actions.

The story of the Good Samaritan is well known to us. Perhaps it is so familiar that we simplify it too much. It is easy for us to be dismissive of the priest and the Levite as being too selfish to respond to the one in need. But there was more to it than that. The priest and the Levite were not so much selfish, as closed and fearful as a result of being enslaved by loyalty and fidelity. They were so bound by the rigidities of rule and tradition and the ‘proper’ way of doing things that they were incapable of moving beyond their narrow world. They simply could not think 'outside the box'.

To have attended to this person who may not have belonged to their in-group and especially if he had died, would have been to become ritually impure and incapable of offering the prayers and sacrifices at the temple to which they were headed. It was their faithful loyalty to prayers and religious expectation that prevented them from meeting the glaring need of the person who invaded their reality.

Jesus began to see that far from bringing people closer to God, the temple was an obstacle. Its day was over.

Brothers, what are the temples in our lives whose days are over? These temples, whether in our individual, community or congregational lives will surely be fatal obstructions to the Spirit.

Are there certain preconceptions and preconditions that we wear like a pair of glasses and which we are not prepared to remove? Do we have these lenses on the reality of HIV/AIDS that are stopping us from creative, imaginative and effective responses? Or perhaps we may be wearing blinkers such as those put on horses to stop them from looking in any way other than narrowly focussed?

Perhaps for some, ideas are stifled by what is perceived as what leadership will or will not condone. Yet we all exercise leadership in some way and this conference is definitely about exercising leadership on behalf of the province. In this, we all, including and especially, those in designated leadership positions need the grace to be open to the new, the untried, the potential failures but the potential growth.

We are not about a replication of the past in new places and circumstances but the creation of something new where we are and where we are drawn to be.

Brothers I invite you to be creative in your imagining the variety of ways in which our mission of evangelisation can be expressed. To be creative and daring enough to overcome inhibitions and prohibitions and cross the road to our brothers and sisters in need, offering both immediate assistance and then longer term care, after the model of the Good Samaritan.

The other Samaritan story in the gospel - The Woman at the Well is also instructive. There are many aspects to this story, let us consider only some.

First, IT SIMPLY WAS NOT DONE for a Jewish man to be speaking to a Samaritan woman. Secondly, the woman has a story of wounded relationships. She is a dis-integrated person.

A challenge for us is to discover whether there are 'Samaritan women' in our individual, district or congregation lives whom we SIMPLY DO NOT consider to be within our ambit? Are there individuals or groups whom we simply do not take into account? Are there areas of involvement which we simply do not consider?

The second aspect of the story, of course, is that it was in the interchange with Jesus that the woman became re-integrated. So many of our brothers and sisters with HIV/AIDS are destroyed people, not only from the illness itself, but from the shame, stigma and rejection that is associated with it.

A radical option towards those with HIV/AIDS and towards HIV/AIDS education, care, prevention and cure is an option to be the very presence of Jesus. It is opting to challenge taboos and prejudices. It is a communication that God's love is everlasting even when the darkness of disease, poverty, suffering , exclusion and stigma can make one think that God has forgotten.

These two gospel stories were key to the Congress on Consecrated Life held a little while ago in Rome. This congress had as its title: Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity. It is my hope that this passion will be truly re-fired in us this week.

Brothers, we share in the charism of Edmund. We too are moved by the spirit to be aware of the providential presence of God in our lives and to respond to Christ present and appealing to us in the poor.

We are truly being invited into an Emmaus journey as we invite the Lord to set our hearts burning with passion for those suffering from HIV/AIDS, in whom we strive to see his presence.

It is not enough for us to work solely for the upward social mobility of young people; equipping them for a career or even restoring health. Any NGO can do that.

Evangelising is far richer. Good health, good career and good education are not of themselves guarantees that the Kingdom of God in on the way. We cannot be satisfied with an educational involvement that assumes the continuity of current unjust structures, since, amongst other reasons, these themselves contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS.



We cannot simply educate with a view to our students being successful in an unjust system. We need to work actively and deliberately for the transformation of the minds and hearts of all people and for the transformation of society. This is not to be incidental to, but key to, our mission.

The Kingdom of God is more about the heart, the deep thirst inside each of us which we are constantly tempted to quench in superficial or harmful ways.

It is a reality that much of the transmission of HIV is through sexual relationships that are casual and without commitment. This reality has often led to judgement, condemnation, rejection and stigma in ways that are foreign to the ways of Jesus. Our response to those affected must surely be one of based on love, compassion and understanding. To the young it must surely be a response of encouragement to self -respect and to wholesome growth in integrity. Such integrity will place healthy, authentic relationships as a superior choice to transitory liaisons lacking in love, and commitment - encounters offering the illusion of quenching our deepest desires. Our response must also be an awareness of the realities of life that lead people to choose unhealthy and destructive lifestyles.

In this regard it is pertinent to note that Pope Benedict has recently been emphasising that Christianity is not a series of prohibitions but rather is something beautiful, a way to fullness of life.

More and more, my belief is that to be most effective our response ought be multifaceted and holistic; that a concentrated and co-ordinated community effort in one place will be of far more impact than the sum of well-intentioned but individual, diverse and dispersed involvements in one place or scattered over a wide area. Without a doubt this need also be in collaboration with others. At the very least I would love to see a kind of task force approach tried, along the lines outlined in my discussion paper circulated prior to this conference.

Brothers, I have touched on just a few of the themes surrounding this urgent topic and I do not wish to pre-empt the outcomes.

I invite you this week to be open to the movements of the Spirit and I trust that the week will flow in such a way as to enable each of us individually and collectively to listen for those movements of God.

Let us pray that things will never be the same and let us truly seek to emulate those early Brothers 'whose very presence seemed to have a soothing effect'.

We are truly looking for ways that we can give to others the water that becomes a spring inside them, welling up to eternal life.

May God bless our work and our play this week.