The day comes when being the sibling of a person with a disability becomes fatherhood. Our parents age, everything grows more fragile, and we siblings become—if we choose it—guardians of those we love. There is nothing automatic about it, nothing simple: you must understand, reflect, and love deeply. This passage can bring profound change, and for me it was a complete turning point. After eighteen years spent in youth ministry, my Bishop and I discerned together and arrived at a priestly vocation that would unite my first calling as a brother with my call to the priesthood. And so I was assigned to the ministry of disability. What a wondrous gift: to discover how Jesus speaks to us of God's deepest identity through weakness.
Grateful for this new ministry, I soon set out to see how profoundly the cultural landscape around disability has shifted over the past fifty years. Drawing on my own lived experience of where we started, I created an online survey to gauge how the world had opened itself to the reality of disability. The survey—whose results you can hear on YouTube by searching "mal di test buttinoni"—made no claim to be scientific. It simply aimed to raise questions and take the temperature of how people actually think. More than four hundred people took time to work through these detailed questions, letting themselves be challenged; that number alone speaks volumes about the generous curiosity with which people now regard the world of disability. Many important questions remain open, but the results were encouraging. People are opening their minds, learning, engaging with one another, and wanting a more welcoming world.
I remember well a day in the early seventies when I walked alongside my grandmother with my little brother and heard a neighbor say: "But why do you take him out like that?" At seven years old, I understood immediately that his difference was not welcome; yet he and I played together constantly, and I couldn't fathom why he couldn't go out into the world with me. To know that less than fifty years later he would meet a far warmer reception is deeply, deeply comforting. Still, I hear the voices of those who, worn down by battles for their children's or siblings' rights, would say there is still so much to do, so much to gain—that schools still fail them, workplaces close their doors, parishes don't truly welcome them, laws stand in the way. Thank goodness there are people who carry the weakest in their hearts.
Perhaps the greatest discovery I have made, the one that has brought me to smile over all these years, is this: every time we care for people with disabilities, every time we place them at the center of our society, our schools, our parishes, our youth groups, our sports teams—our world becomes better.
As our teacher Jean Vanier would say: let us not ask what we can do for them, but what people in their fragility can do for us. They can make our hearts better. And that is the greatest gift. I am grateful to my brother, grateful to my Bishop who placed him at the heart of his concern, grateful to Jean who teaches me how to love him, grateful to Jesus who guides us all toward the discovery of joy.
Don Stefano Buttinoni, 2018