Fear must not erode our humanity

St. Petersburg Times (Florida).

BEVERLY BECKHAM

In the town where I grew up in the 1960s, there was a priest, a young, energetic, dedicated man who embraced God and the church with a passion I will never forget.  Every mass seemed a high mass when he    celebrated it; every prayer, every blessing seemed a promise. Words  diminish whatever it was he brought to the altar with him. And yet I have never found in any other church what I found in my youth in this man's presence.

The entire parish was awed by him, flocked to his masses, heeded his sermons. And when, still a young priest, he became ill and hospitalized, everyone grieved. "Where is he?" people asked. "What happened?"

The disease was tuberculosis and back then it was a disease still feared. The priest was put in isolation and told that no one could visit. Another priest moved into the rectory, replaced him on the altar and in the confessional, filling his space but never his shoes. "When is he coming back?" everyone asked. But nobody knew.

Eventually the ban on visitors was lifted, and adults were invited to come. Still, no one did. He spent a year in a sanatorium eight miles away from where he once preached about the love of God and the goodness of man, and not even his pastor made the short drive to see him.

"You wouldn't catch me in a place like that," I heard a neighbor say. "The doctors say he's not contagious, but what do they know?"

Later, when I was growing up, I learned about lepers abandoned and ostracized at Molokai, about people dragged off to concentration camps while other people watched, about boats full of Jewish refugees sent back to Europe to be apprehended and killed because we refused to accept them here. And with each new tale of people closing their doors to strangers, closing their minds to the possibility of helping another human being, I thought of this priest.

Yesterday, I thought of him again.

A man phoned, someone I don't know. "Those people with AIDS got what they deserve," he boomed. "They sinned and God punishes sinners. They should all be shot."

It is not those things we do in the dark, but those things we do righteously in the day that is the sin, I thought. Passing judgment.

Pointing fingers. Ignoring pain. I tried to explain this to the man.

"Get off it," he said. "Those people are immoral and what they do is wrong."

Members of the Ku Klux Klan are immoral and what they do is wrong.

The American Nazi Party is immoral and what they do is wrong. Wife beaters and child beaters and people who ridicule, terrorize and intentionally harm others are immoral and wrong. But choosing a person to love? Wanting comfort and companionship or maybe just a good time?

At the most this is an indiscretion, a lapse of good judgment, but neither immoral nor wrong.

I, like everyone, am terrified of AIDS because of the death sentence it imposes. But I am more frightened by how it will polarize people: the well against the unwell; the deserving against the undeserving; the good against the bad. We must not allow this to happen. We must not stand passively by and let fear erode our humanity and destroy our compassion, the way it has countless times in the past.

We must not ostracize people because of our own fears.

My priest survived. So will the world. It is the fate of compassion and humanity that worries me.