I'm not a priest given to easy enthusiasm, but I seek to live in wonder because I'm convinced that marveling makes us marvelous. At the conference just held in Assisi, organized by the National Catechetical Office of the Italian Bishops' Conference and centered on "catechesis and disability," I found myself genuinely moved. The first part of the conference took up the Church as a generative womb—a necessary place for the experience of faith. Put more simply, without oversimplifying: a child or an adult cannot walk a serious path of faith on catechism pages and catechesis sessions alone. What's needed is a living, mothering Church that accompanies people through the Christian experience, showing them faces and real possibilities. Up to that point—fascinating reflections and genuine rethinking for a more vital pastoral life. Everything was good, everything running smoothly. Scholarly and deep, but calm.
Then the minibuses arrived carrying disabled people. Sign language interpreters. Colorful posters and panels. Hands raised in applause that made a silent roar deafening. The climate changed entirely. Faces of people who had borne the weight of struggling to be welcomed in their parishes, or fighting for access to the sacraments. Diocesan catechesis coordinators hungry for tools to reach their most vulnerable children. Priests and lay workers who have spent years joyfully welcoming those seeking friendship and support. And people like me who had waited for months—years—for us to truly "meet in order to meet."
I remember with tenderness the day my brother Roberto, almost fifteen, received his First Communion and Confirmation—graces that had been denied him because he couldn't sit with his peers at catechism class. He would never learn to read or memorize. I was only seven, and my First Communion wasn't far off. I was happy. The Bishop had called them all together, in a separate Mass, in a separate church, so they could encounter Jesus in the Eucharist. Roberto stood upright, his curious eyes wide, his hands clasped. My parents finally felt that the Church had not completely rejected them. It was 1974.
Sr. Veronica Donatello—and anyone who doesn't know her is missing something—guided the conference preparation with incredible strength, and her face shone throughout. What struck me most was the testimony of Friar Enzo Biemmi, not only for the power of his reflection but for his visible emotion. He explained it: "It's one thing to give an interesting, learned talk. It's another to speak to you, who know intimately every wound of our failures, our slowness in accepting difference."
I couldn't capture his exact words, but I would sum them like this: we've realized that any renewal—however creative in how we communicate faith—misses the mark unless there is a joyful community, a community alive in its own faith and hungry to share it and witness to it. No method will succeed without a generative womb. To have a child, you must love each other (a community where people love one another), you must desire the child, and so you need faith in the future. Then comes the waiting that nourishes, like gestation in a mother's womb. Then comes birth—painful, with the cutting of the umbilical cord—allowing the child born into faith not to be a photocopy of what you gave them. A long journey, full of care, that becomes a stepping back in trust so that life in the Spirit continues bearing new fruit. "What we need," he said, "is a Church like that: like a mother."
But then he drove the point home. Quoting from Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis's first apostolic exhortation, promulgated on November 24, 2013, he spoke of a Church of body-to-body encounter: an ecclesial body that doesn't shield itself from the wounds of wounded humanity (humanity incarnate in Jesus). Here I quote directly: "The shift from an 'ecclesial mind' (rationality) to an 'ecclesial body-to-body' (sensory, relational, carnal) opens to a new paradigm of Christian initiation that is not so much the Catechumenate as it is standing with people with disabilities, because they have developed those senses we have inhibited. They have awakened those senses of faith that we have frustrated. Standing with them means being generated by them into all the dimensions of Christian faith." Period. What more needs to be said?
I can only think that Jesus's invitation can finally be lived out: "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you." At that banquet, I was nourished. At that supper, I longed to break bread in memory of Him.
Don Stefano Buttinoni, 2018
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Don Stefano Buttinoni manages a YouTube channel and website (parolebuone.it) where he shares valuable material for reflection on spirituality, catechesis, and welcome. The site also features several videos from l'Arca, specially translated and subtitled in Italian.