Her name was Giulia. I met her for the first time one Sunday at the youth center in Carugate, where I had been since 2000, newly ordained and full of enthusiasm and energy. A coordinator from the Don Gnocchi Foundation in Pessano introduced us and made a direct request: "Could Giulia join the Sunday recreational activities at the center for a few hours?" Then she added: "It would give her mother a chance to breathe a little."
Giulia was an eleven-year-old girl with severe disabilities. She didn't speak, but she understood and made herself understood; she walked, but needed substantial assistance. It was the first time I had received a request like this, and I said yes, even as I admitted my complete inadequacy. I had no idea how to include her in a setting as beautiful and complex as a youth center: an organized, structured, crowded space that could be chaotic at times. I never imagined then that saying "yes" would transform not just the way I did my work as a priest, but the way I was.
With help from friends at Faith and Light (who had been in Carugate for years), we began what we now call inclusion: creating the conditions for children and young people with disabilities, together with their families, to take active part in the life of the community, starting with the youth center. Giulia was the first, but others came in time.
My encounter with Giulia was "devastating"—unexpected and difficult to navigate. When I made requests of her, she simply brushed them aside and did what she wanted. Back then, I found her behavior irritating and frustrating; today, I recognize it as one of the most formative experiences of my life. Without meaning to, Giulia dismantled the "delusion of omnipotence" that had been quietly creeping into me, fed by a context where the youth center priest's word was law, where pastoral staff hung on my every word, where every initiative succeeded and won approval.
Giulia shattered it all. She destabilized my growing ego and forced me to confront my darkest, most fragile, most limited self—the part I didn't want to see. That's when the real crisis struck: not a crisis of vocation, but a crisis of being human. I kept asking myself: "But who am I, really?"
Giulia dismantled the "delusion of omnipotence" that had been quietly creeping into me
I now believe that encounter with Giulia—and with the young people who came after her—was providential, a true sign from Heaven. Since then, there have been no coincidences in my life, only God-incidences. This was a turning point I now look back on with gratitude, even as I vividly remember how difficult and painful the years that followed were, years I needed to find a new balance.
From 2012, I asked to dedicate much of my ministry to the world of disability, and in those years I gathered the testimonies of many families who showed me what it meant for a household when a child with disability arrived. I also came to see that the Church was often insensitive to these realities. So in 2015, when the diocesan curia proposed that I create an office to represent the Church of Milan's attention to people with disabilities and their families in the bishop's name, I accepted. That year we launched the Christian Community and Disability working group, which became official in 2021 as a Diocesan Committee with the same name. Since then, I have served in this role, supported by people and organizations of great worth, with profound gratitude for what people with disabilities and their families have done for my growth—human, spiritual, and priestly.
The words of Paul that our archbishop, Monsignor Mario Delpini, drew on for his pastoral letter of 2024-2025 have come alive in my own life: "My grace is enough for you: in fact, power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9). To truly understand what it means that grace is enough, we must not only be aware of our own weakness—we must not be afraid to admit it, to be willing to show it, to let it become the privileged place where God acts. For Paul, this was crucial to his work as an apostle to the gentiles, but it is not easy or obvious. I have come to see how difficult it is, especially in a culture that worships the myth of the superhuman, to acknowledge our own weakness. And then: who has the courage to show it to others? Who truly believes that their weakness is the way God manifests his power? We speak often of these two words, crafting compelling titles for talks and books like "the power of weakness." The paradox is alluring, but then comes the real question: how willing are we to let ourselves be shaped by this logic?
People with disabilities keep unsettling me, both on a personal level and in how we conduct pastoral work in our diocesan communities.
Facing a growing sense of fatigue, of ineffectiveness, of the weakness of our efforts, I observe two phenomena.
The first is a state of crisis that becomes the object of countless analyses and counteranalyses—certainly important work, but it stops there.
The second is that our communities react in two ways to this state of affairs: one is discouragement that leads to disengagement, leaving us with sadness, bitterness, and deep nostalgia for a glorious past, along with a sense of helplessness about what to do. Alternatively, some refuse to give up and obstinately keep proposing the same initiatives, perhaps adding a few more. The intentions are good and the willingness to work is there, but there is also a kind of hysteria, tension, rigidity, nerves frayed by negative signals—and this makes our communities quarrelsome.
Though these are different reactions, what they share is a refusal to accept this sense of impotence and weakness, a reluctance to dwell in it. There is always a pressure pushing us to keep doing, keep striving.
But is there a third way? Between resignation and feverish activism, perhaps there opens a space still unknown (as it should be, after all). A space that might take shape if we learned to see weakness not as failure, but as fertile ground. It is precisely there, in accepted fragility, that the Spirit can make unexpected things grow: new forms of love, of closeness, of pastoral care. In recent years, I have carried in my heart a passage from Evangelii Gaudium in which Pope Francis, speaking of the poor—not only in economic terms, but as victims of a "throwaway culture"—writes: "They have much to teach us. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them. The new evangelization is an invitation to recognize the saving power of their lives and to place them at the center of the Church's journey. We are called to discover Christ in them, to lend them our voice in their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to understand them and to welcome the mysterious wisdom that God wishes to communicate to us through them" (198-199).
And what if that were it? What if the last—the fragile, people with disabilities—were precisely those meant to show us what God desires for his Church? OL