To learn the full story please visit: www.VillageAIDSMemorial.org 

Please follow on social media to support a #SayTheirNames campaign, wherein 580 participants speak life to the 580 names inscribed on this memorial, featuring dozens of celebrities, like Oscar-winning legend WHOOPIE GOLDBERG who pleads:

“Please save the Village AIDS Memorial- it’s the first AIDS Memorial in New York City and the only permanent AIDS memorial in a house of worship anywhere in the world that was born from Saint Mother Teresa’s AIDS activism and connected to Marsha P. Johnson before she passed.”

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Though AIDS is largely under control in first-world countries, this memorial is more important than ever in order to educate the public about the "AIDS pandemic, which after all continues in some countries to this day," as two-time Oscar-winner DAME EMMA THOMPSON generously said for this #SayTheirNames campaign. According to the United Nations, 13 Black children die every hour, over 300 Black Children die every day, and over 116 thousand Black children die every year from AIDS. 

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Dear Pope Francis,

We respectfully ask you to preserve at its current location and make open to public visitation the Village AIDS Memorial, the first AIDS memorial in New York City and the only permanent AIDS memorial in a place of worship anywhere in the world.

This memorial, made up of 580 plaques honoring AIDS victims, is installed in the sanctuary of the Church of Saint Veronica on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, NYC- just a stone's throw away from the historic Stonewall Inn, where the Gay Rights Movement began over 50 years ago. In 2017, the Archdiocese of New York closed the Church of Saint Veronica and has since made plans to remove this memorial. According to a New York Times article published that same year, the Archdiocese has been liquidating property in order to pay the over $230 million owed to the over 1,200 children abused by priests in New York alone.  

The sale of this church is despicable hypocrisy, recalling Jesus' righteous anger when he exclaimed, "My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves." This is a true people’s church because it took 16 years starting in 1887 for poor Irish Catholics to pool their pennies together to build this church, worshipping in the meantime in a horse stable and then a packed basement while other churches of the period took an average of only 18 months at most to construct. Even after the church was completed, the Archdiocese refused to declare the space sacred in the eyes of God until the mortgage was paid off, which didn’t happen for another 27 years. All in all, it was a full 40 years from when the first brick was laid that the Church of Saint Veronica was officially sanctified, a feat so incredible that it prompted the Cardinal at the time to speak these (now) empty words: “I want to say publicly that this is an accomplishment which will go into the records of this Archdiocese and that it will be recorded in letters of gold.”

If this memorial is removed, it will be the next victim of gentrification, erasing the culture and history of populations that already have too few roots remaining. In fact, this would be the last nail in the coffin for the West Village, which has already lost Saint Vincent's Hospital to luxury condominiums. The last standing Catholic hospital in New York City, Saint Vincent's was "ground zero" of the AIDS epidemic, was famously featured in Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America, and treated, by some estimates, half of the over 100,000 who died from HIV and AIDS in NYC. One doctor personally remembers presiding over ten deaths a month, every month, so that he ferried over nearly 2,400 souls unto glory during his tenure at Saint Vincent's.

When it closed in 2010- prompting an investigation by the NY State Attorney General- it also closed a proud trajectory of having been the primary admitting hospital during the 9/11 attacks. One can only imagine what use Saint Vincent's might have been put to during this most recent COVID crisis, instead of sitting mostly empty after the highly affluent tenants of the converted space fled the city during the worst of it. 

The Village AIDS Memorial is miraculous because it brings worlds together that otherwise are seemingly incompatible, as evidenced by the fact that both Saint Mother Teresa and the “Patron Saint” of the LGBTQ Community Marsha P. Johnson were instrumental in birthing this memorial. Winner of the Noble Peace Prize, Saint Mother Teresa left Calcutta for Christopher Street so that she could open New York City’s first AIDS hospice- perhaps the first ever AIDS hospice- in the rectory of Saint Veronica’s on Christmas Eve 1985. Her first AIDS patient Raymond Galvin was a prisoner from Sing Sing Correctional Facility which she was able to free thanks to her celebrity. Though Saint Mother Teresa had no idea, the Church of Saint Veronica sits on land that was first in use as Newgate Prison, New York's official state prison for 30 years starting in 1797 which closed due to overcrowding. Sing Sing was built to replace Newgate Prison, and Raymond Galvin died just 6 days after arriving.  A miracle? New York City's Mayor Ed Koch certainly believed Saint Mother Teresa was capable of working miracles, so amazed that she was able to free three prisoners for her AIDS hospice with such ease, telling the press: “I know of no person in the world – and I mean that with all sincerity – who could get government to work so expeditiously as Mother Teresa did. Government takes a long time to work, except when a saint calls!”

To be clear, Saint Mother Teresa had not yet been canonized at that point, though that didn't stop people from believing in her sainthood. The fact that she was even able to open the GIFT OF LOVE AIDS hospice is miraculous, considering that the Archdiocese of New York first attempted to open an AIDS hospice in another neighborhood of NYC earlier that same year, but were forced to forsake their plans because of opposition from community members in that neighborhood who were afraid of and misunderstood AIDS. All in all, over 200 people with AIDS died at the Church of Saint Veronica, almost all of them gay, and most of them People of Color. The Village AIDS memorial honors no less than 167 of these poor souls who had nowhere else to go, which makes it a sacred and historic artifact for the LGBTQ community and for People of Color. According to eye-witnesses, Saint Mother Teresa was the Guest of Honor at the 1992 dedication ceremony for the Village AIDS Memorial.

When Jesus handed Veronica back her veil, his face was miraculously imprinted upon it, and when Saint Mother Teresa accomplished her mission at the Church of Saint of Veronica, her own face was likewise miraculously imprinted upon that church in the form of the 580 plaques that constitute the Village AIDS Memorial.

In 1985, AIDS was understood to be a “gay disease”- in fact, was first termed GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency)- and while it seemed the rest of the world would shun this community, Saint Mother Teresa wanted to send a different message, one characterized by compassion—a trait she shares with Saint Veronica. Indeed, it was a message that perhaps only a saint could deliver, especially when considering that only four years later, tensions between the Catholic Church and the LGBTQ community would boil over with a protest at New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on December 10, 1989, that saw a man standing on a pew during Sunday mass repeatedly screaming, “Stop killing us!” That protest, organized by AIDS rights organization ACT UP, ended with the arrests of 111 people.

Marsha P. Johnson, the legendary Black Trans leader of the Stonewall Uprising, was photographed standing in front of a Gay Pride Week soup kitchen at the Church of Saint Veronica carrying two plastic bags, apparently having benefited from these types of essential services offered at this unique Roman Catholic Church. A prostitute who was sometimes homeless, Marsha was caught on video marching in a parade down Christopher Street to the Church of Saint Veronica for the first interfaith AIDS memorial service in history almost a year to the day before her body was found floating in the Hudson River just two blocks away. Despite evidence of a “massive head wound”, police ruled her death a suicide, which caused an uproar  in the community at the time in an eerie echo of the type of purpose that powers the Black Lives Matter Movement of today. Thirty years later, this type of mysterious and violent end still haunts Black transgender women, 44% of whom are living with HIV according to the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC). Marsha P. Johnson herself was HIV positive, and ministered to several AIDS patients as they passed unto glory.

Marsha's benevolence caused people to regard her as a “holy person”; during her lifetime, she was called "Saint Marsha", the "Patron Saint" of the LGBTQ Community, and even the "Jesus of Sheridan Square". Eyewitness accounts place her, on several occasions, lying prostrate on the floor of Catholic Churches around six in the morning and facing away from the altar because she felt it would be inappropriate to look directly upon, what she believed, was the holy habitation of the Lord. In her last years of life, she would confess with her mouth that she was “married to Jesus”, a sign of holiness ascribed to the earliest Christian martyrs; and months before her violent, watery death in the Hudson River, while at a birthday party for her friend who was dying of AIDS and whom Marsha herself would nurse until their dying breath, Marsha was recorded stating a desire to journey “across the River Jordan, helping AIDS patients all across America.”

Though most of the 580 plaques in the sanctuary of this Roman Catholic Church honor gay men who led private lives (a revolutionary act which is reminiscent of the radical love preached by Jesus), there are several famous names on this memorial who were the martyrs of the AIDS epidemic, including Ryan White, Marlon Riggs, Elizabeth Glaser, Randy Shilts, Peter Allen, Jeffrey Schmalz, Michael Callen, Tom Waddell and more.

However, if it should be saved for anyone’s sake in particular, it ought to be saved for Little Lisa Carrascosa, the five-year old Bronx girl whose plaque is joined by those of her parents. If, for no other reason, do not let that they disturb Little Lisa’s home, for it seems she’s finally found some rest. Who knows what happened to her, but worse than the tragedy of Little Lisa’s death would be if it were all for nothing. Please use this opportunity to remember, rather than forget.

Please, Pope Francis, remember the way of Saint Veronica, remember the way of Marsha P. Johnson, who championed the most vulnerable members of society, and remember the way of Saint Mother Teresa, whom you yourself righteously canonized, and save the Village AIDS Memorial.

Sincerely,

The Caretakers of the Village AIDS Memorial