ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some aspects of the impact of such biomedical miracles on the religious understandings and practices of a group of mission-educated men who self-identify as Catholic and the challenge that such phenomena pose for the Catholic Church. Through the early years of the new millennium there was extreme reluctance among most of the former students and some of their wives to attend voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) centres to discover their HIV status. For the majority of the former students, this reluctance at first continued even when antiretroviral therapy (ART) became increasingly available in Zambia, especially in urban areas and provincial centres. Despite the prevalence of HIV in Zambia, Christian identity for some appears to be fatally bound up with notions of respectability and civilisation. Additionally, there is the double jeopardy that men fear because of the threat to their loss of status as real men.
