World AIDS Day 2013: Ignatian Family Responds to the Call

BY ISN STAFFDecember 1, 2013

“We express our solidarity with the people affected by HIV/AIDS, especially children, and we express our closeness to the many missionaries and health operators who work in silence. We pray for everyone, also for physicians and researchers. May every sick person, without exception, have access to the care he or she needs.”               -Pope Francis

World AIDS Day 2013 Logo

Ignatian family communities are responding to this call to unite at campuses and parishes across the country and beyond, here are a few examples:

  • Sarah Benson, a junior international studies major at Loyola University Chicago worked with other student leaders of Kids Caring 4 Kids (KC4K) to develop the Just1Campaign to raise funds for the construction of a high school for orphaned boys in Zambia.  The goal of the campaign was to have 200,000 people donate $1 by today (December 1 – World AIDS Day).   You can read more about KC4K’s efforts in an October article in the Loyola Phoenix, Loyola’s student newspaper.
  • Students and faculty at Loyola Marymount University, led by senior Mara De La Rosa, have written a play called “Stages of AIDS.”  De La Rosa was commissioned to write a script based on real stories of love and loss with personal connections to LMU’s College of Communication and Fine Arts.  The play will be performed on campus on December 2nd.  Learn more here.
  • St. Francis Xavier Parish in Manhattan has joined with another local parish to host a World AIDS Day Mass on Tuesday, December 3rd to celebrate World AIDS Day and pray for those who have been victims of HIV/AIDS;
  • Georgetown University’s Initiative for Global Health will host a lecture entitled “The Global Fund 2014-2016: Sustaining the Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.”  Speakers include Ambassador Mark Dybul, M.D., Executive Director, of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria;
  • A series of campus events will culminate with a “Living Ribbon” during the men’s basketball game at John Carroll University.  Other events include a lecture, bracelet campaign, and a fundraiser for St. Aloysius Gonzaga Secondary School in Kenya, a school serving boys who have lost a parent to HIV/AIDS;
  • Internationally the African Jesuit AIDS Network (AJAN) works to support the wide and diverse range of initiatives by Jesuits and their co-workers in AIDS ministry in Africa. AJAN works with Jesuit AIDS ministries in throughout sub-Saharan Africa, which included ministries in each of the 10 Jesuit Provinces and Regions in Africa.

Have an additional event happening in your corner of the Ignatian family?  Send us an e-mail at: [email protected] 

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