AIDS and the Catholic Church As the AIDS epidemic in the United States progressed in the 1990s, it became clear that AIDS had a new target population . AIDS was no longer a strictly homosexual disease but was also spreading to the heterosexual population in general. Additionally, as the decade progressed, new cases of HIV infection were increasingly identified in poor and minority communities. As the AIDS epidemic shifted from the high-profile gay male population to poor and minority communities, political activism and financial support for the fight against AIDS also began to decline. Faced with new limits imposed by dwindling public support and dwindling financial resources, policymakers, humanitarian organizations, and AIDS activists began to analyze how best to expand AIDS-related resources to these new target populations. The U.S. Hispanic community is one of those populations for which new methods of AIDS programming are being sought. Hispanics make up a rapidly growing share of the U.S. minority population, but they remain overrepresented among new cases of HIV infection. According to the CDC, “In 2000, Hispanics made up 13% of the U.S. population (including residents of Puerto Rico), but accounted for 19% of the total number of new U.S. AIDS cases reported that year (8 173 out of 42,156 cases)” (CDC1). Unlike the gay communities of San Francisco and New York in the 1980s, Hispanics lack the financial resources to combat the spread of AIDS in their communities. In fact, the poverty rate for Hispanics of 20 percent reported by the U.S. Census Bureau is about three times that of Caucasians. It is therefore likely that support for combating the spread of AIDS among the Hispanic population will have to come from an outside party. Few institutions are in as ideal a position as the Catholic Church to combat the AIDS epidemic in the Hispanic community in the United States. A statistic from the Catholic Almanac indicates that 80% of American Hispanics are Catholic and therefore the Catholic Church has a very influential presence in the Hispanic community. As an internationally supported community institution, a Catholic community church can draw on the resources of its archdiocese to address community-specific issues. Therefore, an AIDS campaign promoted by the Catholic Church would not necessarily rely on financial support from the communities that benefit the most, namely poor Hispanic communities. One such campaign, the National Catholic AIDS Network, was established in 1989 as a resource for all Catholic communities facing the fight against AIDS..