“Beatified in 1995, the news gives Stateside Catholicism its seventh product raised to the honors of the altar, and is notable on a global level given the widespread devotion to Bl Damien as unofficial patron of HIV/AIDS patients.”
Fr. Damien had leprosy. How did HIV/AIDS get into this? Are our saints now trapped into political correctness? Fr. Damien was anything but politically correct.
Perhaps Damien became the patron of AIDs/HIV patients because they are the outcasts of the day.
However, since AIDs is spread primarily from bad choices in lifestyles, it regretfully seems to be PC.. Still, sinners do need patrons and heroes too.
The Catholic Church believes in healing and caring for the sick, regardless of how they got that way.
When I was younger and a radical leftist, I was one of the few straight guys in the D.C. area doing AIDS volunteer work.
I saw quite a few of the gays involved bashing the Catholic Church. Then I met nuns and monks involved in caring for AIDS patients. This was around 1990 when the AIDS cocktail was a few years away and AIDS still meant a certain (and usually slow and painful) death. Even then, the Catholics doing the worked looked to Father Damien a role model. One of the orders of nuns helping AIDS patients called itself the “Damien Ministries”, for example.
(Incidentally, the bashing of religion was one of many reasons I turned away from the left. I thought the religious workers were doing so much and getting so little credit from the AIDS activists. But that’s another story.)
Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux is considered a patronness of AIDS patients, even though she died of tuberculosis. She’s also patronness of missions, even though she never left the Carmel monastery. There doesn’t always need to be a direct connection.