Please don't hesitate to write to us—with your suggestions, comments, criticisms, praise for the magazine, or your own questions and struggles.
When you share, you help others facing the same difficulties. And you help us know and understand more deeply the world of disability, which we have been part of for many years.
We will do everything we can to help you and to show you that we genuinely care about what you are living through—all of it, the hard parts included.
Please cover specific disabilities
We've received copies of the Ombre e Luci newsletter. I'm pleased to tell you it has been warmly received by both parents and friends. I find it very well conceived. I believe each issue should include a scientific treatment of a particular disability—Down syndrome, autism, and so on. (Parents' and educators' experiences are essential.) L.C.
Best wishes from ANFFAS
We received your first issue of "Ombre e Luci," the Italian edition of the French journal "Ombres et Lumière."
As an Italian association of parents, we welcome this new magazine, which will help the wider world understand our lived experiences, our struggles, and the attitudes that the media and public opinion should adopt toward people with intellectual disabilities and their families.
In your first issue, we appreciated Jean Vanier's article on the emotional lives of people with intellectual disabilities, and we were pleased to see the informational note about ANFFAS. We look forward to sharing information about your work in our own publication and providing further documentation.
We wish you every success with this initiative, and send our warmest regards. Avv. Luigi Cucari, President of ANFFAS
Enough pity
When we talk about including people with disabilities in society, the first thing we need to eliminate is pity toward them. How? By opening dialogue with those closest to us—with the families of people with disabilities, with teachers and students. This is where the Church goes wrong: by speaking in terms of compassion, by seeing the disabled person as a poor soul without a future. That's what excludes us even more. We need to fight this prejudice, which serves none of us well. Speak up. Write about it. Best regards. P.C.
Moral and spiritual support
I read and deeply appreciated the magazine "Ombre e Luci," which you kindly sent me. It stirred in my heart a hope that it will bring comfort to the many families who long to feel understood by all humanity and to receive the mysterious gift of that love through which we know ourselves as brothers and sisters, bearing one another's suffering as our own. This means especially much to those of us whose religious vows have made us more aware of the suffering of all people. Through our prayers, we will ask the Lord to lift up the pain of all parents and to transfigure it through trust in the heart of Jesus, who knew so tenderly how to console and ease the suffering of those who came to him seeking comfort and healing. For our part, we will do all we can, whenever the opportunity arises, to share this magazine—so thorough and complete in every detail—as a true moral and spiritual aid for this suffering part of the body of Christ. a Benedictine sister