RELIGION : Catholic AIDS Session Rapped
VATICAN CITY — Priests, nuns and health workers used to dealing with AIDS sufferers today attacked the Vatican’s first conference on the disease for not being prepared to listen to AIDS patients themselves.
“I’m quite distressed that this conference about AIDS has totally ignored people with AIDS,” said Peter Larkin, a Roman Catholic from London who suffers from the disease. “I get a bit tired being told how I feel and how I think, and I would prefer if people asked me,” he told a splinter group of priests, nuns and health workers.
About 80 people broke away from the conference to stage their own meeting during a lunch break that turned into a virtual insurrection against conveners of the conference.
John White, an Irish Catholic priest with acquired immune deficiency syndrome who was evicted from the conference Monday for holding up a banner reading “The Church Has AIDS,” was readmitted today after some participants petitioned for him to be allowed back in.
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