Dear Friends, I am truly glad to join the joyful chorus of voices celebrating with you forty years of Faith and Light in Italy. I add my voice by urging you to continue your journey through seas of suffering—apparently turbulent, yet full of epiphanies of faith and light. But we must prepare for this voyage by recovering clarity of mind and heart and freedom from stereotype, by rekindling our capacity for wonder. As Chesterton warned, "Our world will not perish for want of wonders, but for want of wonder."
And the first, dominant, and unsettling wonder that meets us is the vulnerability of the human creature—with all its attendant weakness, fragility, shame, and mortality. For people with disabilities, this becomes almost an emblem, a call, even a jolt to shake us from our shallowness. As the French philosopher Julia Kristeva wrote, it is "their gaze that pierces our shadow." To be vulnerable is simply to be human. We cannot feel like strangers to this truth or confine it to a single category of people. Yet we often censor ourselves—out of fear, inertia, or banality. Contemporary society rejects the weight of the questions that arise here; science tries to postpone until tomorrow what today has no cure.
We need, therefore, a return to authentic ethics—one that lets us live alongside our limits without the anesthesia of indifference or denial, yet also without the despair of helplessness. Jean Vanier wrote: "A new humanism demands genuine work on ourselves. As Martin Luther King said, to avoid despising others so different from us, we must accept ourselves—with our own weaknesses and disabilities." In this way we change how we see a reality that seems so "scandalous" and foreign to the able-bodied person. To integrate our mortality, we must dare to encounter the weaker other, one who has already lived through what is common to us all: our fragility. And it is on this ground that faith takes root.
When we move through this existential territory, a surprising figure appears before us: the Christian "disabled God" revealed in the suffering and death of Christ—terribly human and wonderfully divine, risen yet still bearing the wounds of passion. This God, "vulnerable and anguished," is the God Vanier encountered, the God who changed his life: "My faith in God is not faith in a God of power, but faith in a God mighty enough to become powerless, who becomes poor to reach us in our human poverty."
The same insight belongs to the martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote without hesitation in the Nazi camp: "In Christ, God saves us not through his omnipotence but through his powerlessness." This brings God not merely close but intimate to vulnerable and wounded humanity. The figure of Christ who does not merely heal the leper but "touches" him (Mark 1:41), and of Francis who follows in those footsteps by embracing a leper—these become parables that transcend every sacred or secular rhetoric. Concreteness enters our reflection. Affection does not hesitate to venture into the high paths of mystery. Broken dailiness submits itself to the judgment of reason and faith.
I hope, therefore, that Faith and Light will continue to be a living, passionate bond with the weakest among us—a relationship with those sometimes rejected by others. In this meeting, as in true love, we give to the other freedom and human dignity. We consider and value them. We see their beauty and worth. For each of us, it means carrying weights and difficulties together, encouraging and supporting one another, bearing love to where we live. We cannot do this alone, but we do it with Jesus, who tells us: "Do not be afraid; I am with you" (Matthew 28:20).
We are all called to raise a barrier against the seduction of indifference—that indifference which is annoyed by the presence of suffering and disability and would simply erase it rather than have it disturb its bland celebration. Over all this shines Vanier's "profession of joy," even in the weakness of this new stage of his long life: "I feel happy to live and to exist. I feel something like a fullness welling up from the very depths of my being."
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, 2015