"My calling is to be happy and to live in the midst of my community. It is a privilege to live with fragile people. Someone with a disability certainly needs skilled professionals—good doctors, physiotherapists—but above all needs someone to say: I love living with you. To love means to do things for a person; to love means to reveal in them their own beauty, which matters exactly as it is." These words from Jean Vanier, spoken in Rome last November, prompted us to ask him some questions.
Do you think parishes give proper attention to welcoming the weak?
The sad truth is that parishes largely lack any real awareness that people with disabilities are something precious. People with disabilities possess a simplicity and a capacity to love in so many ways—ways that can transform our hearts. The Church is meant to be the first home for the weak and the poor, yet for many years people with disabilities were (and sometimes still are) treated as less than fully human. Before communities like L'Arche or Fede e Luce existed, before people like Mariangela spoke for them, the mere thought of having a child with mental disability was considered a tragedy. What we must do is keep fighting. Fighting not only for people with mental disabilities, but above all for teaching love to people—in parishes and beyond them.
We've made enormous progress in accepting people with disabilities, yet Fede e Luce communities still face difficulties. Sometimes welcoming fragile people fails to truly touch our hearts. How can we change them?
Most often, people are so unsettled by the presence of people with disabilities that they cannot see their beautiful capacity to love. There are still many who think with their heads alone, not their hearts. To open our hearts requires relationship, requires dialogue, without worrying about performing a particular attitude. There is no formula for this change: our heart must touch the heart of the other in communion.
Families with disabled children often struggle to encounter older people with disabilities. How can we help them feel more at ease?
I understand these parents. When they're part of a community with many different disabilities and ages, they naturally feel afraid and hesitant to attend. Even if there's hope their child might improve, parents suffer imagining what their son or daughter will become in ten or twenty years—perhaps because they're not yet ready to see it. To meet this need, we're creating small communities in France just for parents of children under ten. It's easier to gather that way; something happens among the parents that lets them help and enjoy each other. Hope stays alive, and it's easier to trust the future when you're surrounded by young children.
How can Fede e Luce communities of different faiths live out ecumenism together?
It would be beautiful to find people who see unity beyond the way we pray, even when we pray differently—Orthodox prayers, for instance. In Italy this is hard because it's such a Catholic country, unlike England or America. Every Orthodox or Protestant is a gift from God; they too have received the Holy Spirit; their parents have suffered as Catholic parents suffer. How do we find common ground? One way is spreading Fede e Luce's ecumenical documents, but it's a long road ahead, because many are still too rooted in their own religious traditions.
How can we attract new friends who haven't yet encountered disability?
We should talk more about disability in schools. Visit classrooms and help students discover the mystery of disability through meetings with fragile people, through hearing their stories and experiences. This has been done before, but we need renewal—fresh ideas more in step with today's reality.
There are people whose absence goes unnoticed in our daily lives, in church or at school: those who never saw the light because of therapeutic abortion. Can you speak to this?
Generally, people are terrified when they learn they'll have a disabled child, and they quickly see abortion as a solution. They think the price will surely be less than years of sacrifice and worry. But I believe life is stronger than death. All of us struggle and suffer—this is completely natural. Unfortunately, suffering, this natural struggle, sometimes pushes people toward the easier choice, but it's not always the one closest to God and truth.
Edited by Cristina Tersigni and Rita Dinale