About a decade ago, Emily Reimer-Barry's volunteer work at an AIDS outreach agency in Chicago prompted her to confront complex ethical and theological questions about Catholic Church teaching on sex and marriage, and how that teaching impacts the lives of women living with HIV and AIDS. She decided then to interview eight married Catholic women living with HIV in order to discern whether church teaching is in fact good news for them—contributing to their flourishing in mind, body, and spirit—and to consider how the church might best support persons with HIV. In a refreshing way, Reimer-Barry's ethnographic method answers Pope Francis's call in Evangelii Gaudium to evangelize by moving beyond “a desk-bound theology” and by practicing accompaniment, which requires reverent listening to persons, especially those who are suffering (5). Reimer-Barry draws effectively on contemporary research in theological ethics and the work of interdisciplinary scholars, while keeping the stories of her courageous research participants at the project's heart. She thus proposes a grounded theology of Christian marriage that is life giving for people living with HIV and AIDS.
The book begins with the stories of eight resilient women who are HIV positive; the reader discovers how each learned of her diagnosis, and how that diagnosis transformed her sense of self and relationships. Reimer-Barry focuses on four threads in the women's stories: survival, sex, faith, and self-care. Readers learn about the daily fears and challenges navigated by these women in order to simply survive, let alone flourish. For example, they struggle to gain access to good medical care and sometimes must “choose between medicine and food” because of prohibitive medical costs. They must navigate relationships in communities (including church communities) marked by stigma and ignorance, as well as intimate sexual relationships that are significantly changed by HIV status (46–47). What becomes clear is how difficult self-care can be for these women, and how reliant self-care is on healthy and just social, economic, and environmental conditions.
Informed by their stories, Reimer-Barry recommends ways that church communities may better encourage self-care of women living with HIV and truly become pro-life in response to HIV and AIDS. First, she suggests that church communities emphasize life-affirming messages about God's saving love, proper self-love, and the necessity of mutuality and equality in relationships. These messages foster self-care and help people distinguish between healthy and unhealthy Christian self-sacrifice. Second, church communities must counteract stigma with hospitality—actively including and supporting persons living with HIV and refusing to describe them as sinful or illness as punishment for sin. Third, churches should provide comprehensive sexual education that promotes empowerment, self-care, and responsibility (106). Further, churches should advocate for harm-reduction strategies like condom use and needle exchange programs and increase social-action programs. Ultimately, Reimer-Barry proposes a theology of marriage that explicitly rejects “the legacy of patriarchal marriage traditions and the lingering effects of this sexism in Christian theology and practice,” which undermine the church's claim that marriage is a partnership ordered to the flourishing of both spouses (179). She argues that family ministries, marriage-preparation programs, and the wedding liturgy provide opportunities to evangelize couples and the wider community about a more inclusive, liberating theology of marriage.
Surely, not all church leaders and ethicists will agree with the moves Reimer-Barry makes—for example, advocating for comprehensive sex education, condom use, and needle exchanges, and de-essentializing procreation in the definition of marriage in light of “the ordinary messiness of sexual loving in real life” when one or both partners are HIV positive (133). Indeed, Reimer-Barry rightfully acknowledges and carefully engages related theological-ethical debates in the text. With this project, she makes a valuable contribution to ongoing conversations. Reimer-Barry gives readers a glimpse of the daily fears, struggles, and triumphs of women living with HIV. She helps us understand how these women largely feel “ignored and silenced within the church,” rather than feeling supported by its gathered communities and teachings. Deftly, even lovingly, Reimer-Barry puts their “unsettling and de-centering” stories in dialogue with church teaching and contemporary research in Catholic ethics in order to propose concrete ways they might better be supported and to develop a truly life-giving and inclusive theology of marriage (28). Not only will undergraduate and graduate students be enriched by reading this accessible and insightful book, but anyone interested in Catholic Church teaching on sex and marriage will benefit as well.
