Enfrentamento religioso e política: as lições da resposta à Aids

Abstract

Religious coping with illness and the interactions among diverse forms of religiosity have posed challenges for the practice of health professionals, especially when sexuality is involved. What lessons can coping with AIDS offer? Based on archival research, case studies, workshops, and interviews, this article discusses the response to AIDS through the perspective of religious leaders who lived through its fi rst decades in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Notions of solidarity, human rights, and ecumenicalism were articulated in the construction of the social response to the epidemic, including prevention efforts centered on condom use. These ideas expressed the historical period when mobilization for democracy post-dictatorship paralleled the AIDS crisis emergence. As in other religious traditions, “humanist-Catholics” in the government shared this perspective with their peers in the higher rungs of the Church, producing a “collaborative” religious coping style. In the Catholic responses, people with AIDS, including priests and seminarians, were cared for with the support from the Archdiocese, while the strained internal debate created opposition among “pastoralists” and followers of Liberation Theology and “canonists”, especially in the fi eld of prevention in which the Vatican delivered a discourse of a moral and “delegating” style of coping. Religious followers in whatever position – followers, clergy, authorities – produce and reproduce discourses on religious coping available in their socio-cultural and political contexts; its symbolisms remain implicated in personal coping – with cognitive, emotional and behavioral effects. Religious coping cannot be reduced to individual behavior and its relationship with dogma, the sacred and the transcendental. A broader comprehension of its psychosocial and institutional-political dimensions, as well as the interaction with the lived religiosity will enhance the research and the professional practice.