AFTER TWO YEARS of COVID-19, the world yearns to move forward. Meanwhile, we commemorate 40 long years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The first years were characterized by silence, as government, churches, and other institutions generally ignored people living with HIV and dying from AIDS. However, compassionate individuals broke the silence and offered care and advocacy. In Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear, Michael J. O’Loughlin gives voice to Catholics who followed the gospel call to serve these marginalized in the U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s.
Hidden Mercy, based on the podcast series Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church, focuses on the experiences of a few individuals—including a nun in the Midwest, a gay artist priest, and a lay Catholic nurse. One championed the first public HIV/AIDS education program—notably held in a Catholic church. Others advocated for hospital beds for HIV patients, established hospice homes, or ministered to the homeless and persons of color, who were—and still are—disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. They facilitated pharmaceutical clinical trials that included persons of color. Others led interfaith memorial services. These Catholics ministered to the sick while the institutional Catholic Church was first silent, later insensitive, and at times heartless in written and verbal statements targeting gay people with HIV/AIDS.
Hidden Mercy focuses on survivors, but the horrific experiences of people who lived and died with AIDS also need to be told. O’Loughlin references doctors and nursing home staff who refused to care for people with AIDS. Funeral homes turned away the deceased. Priests preached that AIDS was a punishment from God. Bishops used their influence to remove AIDS from death certificates, trying to erase the existence of gay priests. A mother told her 22-year-old gay son her biggest mistake was not having aborted him. To preserve history and to honor the dead, these stories need to be told in more detail.
A strength of the book is how O’Loughlin, a gay Catholic journalist who has reported on the epidemics of bullying and suicide among LGBTQ youth and the firings of LGBTQ Catholic schoolteachers, acknowledges complexity rather than reducing history to simple binaries. He gives voice to tensions experienced by gay Catholics who were spurned by many in the church but craved healing through their faith and tradition—a tension O’Loughlin argues remains for LGBTQ Catholics. While some Catholics he profiles rejected church pronouncements on homosexuality, others could not do so outright at the time, but still “did the work because it needed to be done.” This work is not finished. Tens of thousands are diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. each year—mostly gay men of color—but there is no public outcry.
Through the models in Hidden Mercy, O’Loughlin challenges everyone—wherever they are on their journeys toward accepting and loving LGBTQ people—to fight injustice with compassion. In responding to this challenge, the millions of lives lost may be honored, not silenced.
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Arthur G. Fitzmaurice works in Kampala, Uganda, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, improving health care for people living with HIV. His ministry includes serving homeless LGBTQ youth in a country where homosexuality is criminalized.
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