A visit to South Africa and Zimbabwe has enabled a delegation from the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales to "put faces to the statistics" on HIV/AIDS in southern Africa, said a church official."We've met many people living with HIV/AIDS as well as people in the church who provide care," said Alexander Desforges, spokesman for the bishops' conference, from Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
Before visiting Zimbabwe, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of Westminster, England, conference president, and Bishop Crispian Hollis of Portsmouth, England, attended the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference plenary meeting in Mariannhill, South Africa. They also visited church projects in Kwazulu-Natal province at the invitation of South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban.
"Our calling as Christians is to have compassion for one another as people struggle to live beyond the confines of the disease," Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said in a Jan. 28 statement from Mariannhill. "The local church seeks not to solve all of the problems, but to help people cope with whatever problems arise and to improve the quality of their lives."
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor and Bishop Hollis visited families affected by HIV/AIDS who are being helped by church projects in Imbali, near Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. They also visited St. Theresa's AIDS hospice in Inchanga.
"I have great admiration for the bishops in southern Africa for their steadfastness in confronting the social difficulties of the post-apartheid era," Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said, noting that the bishops "are helping to build a new South Africa, and the process is beset by myriad challenges."
As well as "rebuilding a society that suffered under apartheid, there is now the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the additional burden of millions of refugees, up to 4 million from Zimbabwe alone," Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said.
Bishop Hollis, chairman of the English and Welsh bishops' international affairs department, said in the statement that "South Africa is in a transitional period, and this visit has enabled us to witness the many challenges faced by the church and society."
With the world's highest inflation rate, Zimbabwe has acute shortages of basic foodstuffs, fuel and electricity and an unemployment level of 80 percent. Estimates of the scale of migration from Zimbabwe range from 1 million to 4 million people, and international donor agencies say more than 4 million people in Zimbabwe require emergency food assistance.
About 3,000 refugees from central and southern Africa attended a Jan. 27 Mass in Durban's cathedral.
"We were quite surprised at the vast number of Zimbabweans in South Africa," Desforges said.
The increasing number of Zimbabwean refugees in Great Britain has led to the appointment of a Zimbabwean chaplain in London, who was to begin work in February, he added.
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