AIDS and the Catholic Church As the AIDS epidemic progressed in the United States in the 1990s, it became clear that AIDS had a new target population. AIDS was no longer a strictly gay disease but was also spreading through the general heterosexual population. Furthermore, as the decade progressed, new cases of HIV infection were increasingly identified in poor and minority communities. As the focus of the AIDS epidemic shifted from the high-profile male homosexual population to the poor, minority communities also began to decline in political activism and financial support for the fight against AIDS. With new limitations imposed by declining public support and dwindling financial resources, policymakers, aid organizations, and AIDS activists have begun to analyze how best to extend AIDS-related resources to these new target populations . The US Hispanic community is one such population for which new AIDS programming methods are being researched. Hispanics make up a rapidly growing portion of the U.S. minority population, but are still overrepresented among new cases of HIV infection. According to the CDC, "In 2000, Hispanics represented 13 percent of the U.S. population (including residents of Puerto Rico), but accounted for 19 percent of the total number of new U.S. AIDS cases reported that year (8,173 of 42,156 cases)" (CDC 1). Unlike the gay male communities of San Francisco and New York in the 1980s, Hispanics lack the financial resources to fight the spread of AIDS in their communities. As a matter of fact, the 20% Hispanic poverty rate reported by the US Census Bureau is approximately three times that of Caucasians. Therefore, support for combating the spread of AIDS among the Hispanic population will likely need to come from an external third party. Few institutions are as well positioned as the Catholic Church to address the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Hispanic community. A statistic from The Catholic Almanac states that 80% of US Hispanics are Catholic, and therefore the Catholic Church has a very influential presence in the Hispanic community. As a community-based institution with international support, a Catholic community church can draw on the resources of its archdiocese to address specific community issues. Therefore, an anti-AIDS campaign spread through the Catholic Church would not necessarily rely on financial support from those communities that benefit most, namely the Hispanic and poor communities. One such campaign, the National Catholic AIDS Network, was established in 1989 as a resource for all Catholic communities involved in the fight against AIDS..