Belief is a word we readily attach to faith in God or commitment to ideas. We miss its importance for our own lives, for our happiness. And yet it concerns all of us—when we understand it as trust—as Luca Badetti explains simply in his book I Believe in You, published by San Paolo in 2021.
The book opens with a moment when belief, in its ordinary sense, felt nearly impossible for Badetti. He was struggling. "You know, I believe in God, but…," he began to say aloud. Someone nearby understood him deeply: Jennifer, a woman with Down syndrome living in an L'Arche community in Chicago, where Badetti was working as an assistant, somehow found the right frequency to answer him. She repeated three words: I believe in you. Those words pierced the shield that kept him from reaching another level of understanding—the realization that he did not fully believe in himself.
This episode, along with many others Badetti has witnessed through his years at L'Arche communities—his background spans theology, clinical psychology, and disability studies—enriches every chapter. Each story illuminates the theme from a new angle, allowing readers to discover what we struggle to see: that people with intellectual disabilities, alongside their challenges, possess potentials we find hard to recognize. They surprise us. They transform us. They strip away the veil we try so hard to hide behind. We truly need life in relationship; the pandemic made this devastatingly clear. And it is in vulnerability itself that real relationship finds space. The book was written before the pandemic, yet no moment could be more fitting to meet us now, in a time when so many have lost faith.
The book unfolds in two parts: eight chapters on steps toward believing in ourselves, then four chapters on the other side—believing in others. Step by step, Badetti shows us that these two cannot exist apart. He pushes us to examine how we define ourselves by what we do, by what we excel at—without revealing who we truly are. He returns again and again to Jesus's commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. We tend to neglect loving ourselves. We often believe we don't deserve love, and we resort to tricks that contradict love's very nature. Badetti draws on a beautiful reflection by theologian Henri Nouwen on First Love—not romantic love, but God's love for each of us, the love that called us into being. This is something anyone, regardless of faith, can claim: the knowledge of being loved. It echoes in those words God speaks to his Son—"You are the beloved"—and they are for each of us. Badetti goes further: even those without religious faith must find a way to honor their own worth and love themselves, grounded in the dignity inherent in being human, fragile and vulnerable though we may be.
The book offers insights that reshape how we see people with disabilities, starting with how Badetti speaks of them. We are accustomed to stories of heroes or objects of pity. In disability, we notice only what is missing. We struggle to imagine a full life for someone with an intellectual disability. But in these pages, another possibility appears: relationship flourishes. Community thrives. Small things—sharing a coffee together—restore perspective to ordinary days. Yes, people with disabilities carry an inevitable weight of suffering, as Badetti acknowledges. Yet history has moved us forward in many ways: we now have the tools to move beyond narratives that exclude people with disabilities from society.