People with disabilities are increasingly integrated into the Church today. Yet how much more effort and hope we still need so that our disabled brothers and sisters find their rightful place in our parishes and receive the life of God! (...)
Some priests hesitate or refuse. Many of the faithful feel uncomfortable. And you parents—sometimes you dare not even imagine your child receiving the sacrament of reconciliation, or receiving Christ's body in communion, or being confirmed with the gift of the Spirit. How can you dare to imagine it when your child has a profound disability? Or when he is locked in autism?
There is another problem: the absence of suitable catechesis for a child who is completely deaf, or for a young person struck by cerebral palsy with all its difficulties of communication.
The question we are often asked is: "Is he capable?" In this issue of Ombre e Luci, we would like to answer with two other questions: "Does she need this? What is God's desire?"
Jesus said: "Without me, you can do nothing." Nothing. Jesus knows our radical inability to live in love and truth by our own strength alone. Before leaving his disciples, he promises: "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world." He remains present in his Church through his sacraments, to share his Life with us.
When Jesus says: "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will not have life in you," can we think that he excludes those to whom he was most close on earth—people wounded in body, in intellect, in spirit? Who can say there is no freedom, however hidden, in the most diminished being? Even the most afflicted can stiffen to express rejection, or open a smile to show consent.
Created in God's image and likeness, yet like all of us wounded by original sin, people with disabilities need baptism to become daughters and sons of God. Do they not also need the nourishment of the Eucharist and God's forgiveness? Do they not need to receive confirmation and the anointing that gives strength, patience, and trust in sickness and at the moment of passage to God?
Do they not have the right to share with us all these treasures of God? The Eastern Catholic rites and the Orthodox Church, by inviting newborns to receive the sacraments of Confirmation and Eucharist immediately after Baptism, offer us a path for reflection. The child, the person with intellectual disability, cannot approach God through intellectual means. But God reveals himself through his intimate presence, through communion of hearts (...).
God's great desire is to give himself to each of us. Mysteriously, God finds his joy in us (...).
Our disabled brothers and sisters discover this immense tenderness of God to the extent that parents, catechists, and parishes reveal it to them. God needs us to become his intermediaries to show his love. In return, they will give this message back to us transformed, made new. We evangelize them, but in turn, they evangelize us (...).
Gestures speak louder than words. Remember when John Paul II, during a national gathering at the Vatican, gave the Eucharist to two young people visibly and gravely afflicted. One of their fathers, recounting this gesture of the Pope, concluded: "The Pope did what Jesus would have done." May this issue of Ombre e Luci help us all to bring about the meeting of Jesus with his most beloved children. May they be revealed the mysteries hidden from the wise and the learned—mysteries that God has chosen to make known to the very small.
Marie Hélène Mathieu, 1995