At this year’s Easter Vigil, AIDS patient Kenneth, 43, will start his new life in Christ as a Catholic. He’s excited and says he’s never been happier.

A year ago, he believed he was as good as dead — and he thought he might as well die drunk.
Battling AIDS and Hepatitis C — which he’d contracted years ago from doing intravenous drugs — he was a broken man when Seton House, a home for homeless HIV/AIDS patients run by Blessed Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, took him in last summer.

At that time Kenneth, who because of the stigma attached to AIDS is identified by his first name only, had just lost everything for the umpteenth time and was furious. But over the last year, through Christian love shown him by Catholic laity, clergy and religious sisters, he’s found faith. And he wants eternal life.

He’s already been to hell and back.

“And I put myself there,” he readily admits.

His troubles have mainly been caused by alcohol and drug abuse. The addictions started nearly 20 years ago, after a brief marriage to his high school sweetheart, with whom he had two children, ended. He gave up the drugs cold turkey shortly before being diagnosed with HIV in 1988.

“I didn’t even know what AIDS was then,” he recalled.

Told he had about five years to live, he went into denial and increased his drinking. He would hold down a job awhile and start to get his life back on track, then blow everything with a drinking binge. In 1995, moved to seek treatment for his drinking and HIV, he discovered he also had Hep C. Again he was given five years to live; his response was to fall back into his old ways.

After another love relationship ended in 1998, his life became one long alcoholic binge with moments of sobriety.
“I just didn’t care anymore,” he said, noting that in addition to losing his girlfriend, he had also lost the jobs he had been working and became homeless.

“From ’98 on it was just a long drawn out hell,” he said. “The jail saw me quite a bit and so did detox. I don’t even remember it all, really.”

By late 2005 he had had enough. He went through a six-month Salvation Army rehabilitation program, quit drinking, got a job and was going to school. Back in treatment for what was now full-blown AIDS, doctors suspected he might have cancer. A one-day exploratory surgery revealed that he didn’t, but he ended up getting a staph infection and had to stay in the hospital a month.

“The only person who came to see me during that month was a Catholic lady,” Kenneth said, explaining that she was an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist who upon discovering he wasn’t Catholic, continued to stop by weekly anyway to offer him a comforting word as she made her rounds taking Communion to Catholics.

The 185-pound 6-footer lost nearly half his weight in the hospital and was so weak when he was released that he was unable to continue his new job and education. Homeless, sick and without prospects, he was referred to Seton House.
“I thought I was going to die in the hospital,” Kenneth said. “Then, when I got out of the hospital and found I couldn’t go back to school or work, I thought my life was over again.”

With his hope for a new life gone, Kenneth was mad.

“I was quite angry, very angry,” he declared. “I had gotten into alcohol treatment to start my new life. This little day-surgery changed all that. I thought if I can’t have life, then I want to be drunk.”

The compassionate care he received at Seton House from the nuns and the volunteers, and that of the priests who minister there and at a Catholic-sponsored AIDS support group he began attending, softened and then changed his heart.

“The five (religious) sisters here, I can’t express what they’ve done for my life,” Kenneth said. “They fed me, they prayed for me, they were my friends. I didn’t have any friends before, just drunks.”

He wanted the same joy, love and generous spirit the nuns and volunteers of Seton House seemed to have. One day he asked a volunteer what the secret was.

“He said, ‘God,’” Kenneth recalled. “He started talking to me about his faith, and he made it look so fun — like it made his life happy. The sisters mentioned catechism. No pressure, they just asked if I wanted to check it out. I said sure.”

He began attending the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. As with the nuns and others at Seton House and the facilitators of the AIDS support group, he was deeply moved by the unconditional acceptance his fellow catechumens and candidates showed him and two other men from Seton House in the RCIA class.

“I have AIDS and I was homeless,” he said. “They weren’t scared, they’d give us hugs.”

Having grown up without any religious upbringing, learning about Catholic teaching was at times overwhelming. But the nuns and Father Regis Scanlon from Seton House, and facilitator Al Hooper and Father Bob Fisher from the AIDS support group were patient with him, answered his questions and helped him to grow in understanding and love for the Catholic faith.

“They’re all wonderful,” Kenneth emphasized.

“I’ve learned and learned and learned,” he said. “It’s changed my heart and my head.”

When people wonder why they should go on living when they have a chronic disease such as AIDS, said Hooper, the Church reminds them their disease is treatable.

“The question is, ‘Do you choose life or death?’” he said. “The Church always urges people to choose life — and life eternal.”

In Christ, people discover that their lives have purpose and meaning, Hooper said, even in grave suffering.
“God destroyed himself for love,” Hooper said of Christ’s sacrifice. “Pope Benedict says, in ‘God is Love’ (‘Deus Caritas Est’), that it is through acts of love that the world will believe.”

That’s true in Kenneth’s experience.

“It’s all about people treating me … like they’re doing it for Jesus,” he said, noting the nuns’ and others living out the command from Matthew’s Gospel to serve others as though serving Christ.

“When I was hungry, they fed me; thirsty, they gave me a drink; sick, they visited me,” he said. “That’s what happened to me.”

That experience of love led him to reach out to his brother who was facing death as he anxiously awaited a liver transplant. The transplant did come, restoring Kenneth’s brother to health. And in ministering to his brother, their relationship was renewed.

Formerly so angry about his own chronic illness that he wanted to drink till he died, Kenneth now sees his condition differently.

“I’m grateful for HIV because it got me here,” he said about Seton House and his faith journey.

“I was spiritually dead when I got to Seton House, but I got reborn there,” Kenneth said. “The anger’s gone. Now I don’t think about a drink.”

He’s convinced his Christian conversion will be a better and more lasting change than previous attempts at rehabilitation.

“I have Jesus, now,” Kenneth stressed. “I have faith.”

“Whatever happens from this point on,” he said, “I’m not scared of it: success or failure, life or death.
“I have a new life,” he asserted, “and a new heart.”