Born in Windhoek, Namibia, in 1972 and raised in South Africa, Justin Glyn lives with nystagmus—an inability to hold visual focus—along with severe myopia and partial strabismus corrected through surgery. Abnormal tissue growth presses on his optic nerve, severely compromising his sight and apparently causing the epilepsy he manages with medication. These elements force him to navigate the world with a white cane and two unusual telescopes mounted on his glasses.
In 1998, Glyn moved to New Zealand, where he earned a doctorate in administrative and international law from the University of Auckland. After completing his studies, he felt drawn strongly to both the legal profession and the priesthood, but was advised to gain more experience in the world before pursuing religious life. He chose instead to focus on law in South Africa and New Zealand. Joining the Jesuits, he was ordained a priest in August 2016. He then traveled to Canada to study canon law at St. Paul University in Ottawa, where he earned his license.
Thanks to Civiltà Cattolica, we finally have an article on theology and disability addressed to the Italian public. But what does a partially sighted Jesuit—inspired by his British confreres Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Southwell, captivated by the French paleontologist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (himself a Jesuit)—tell us about the relationship between disability and the Church?
Father Glyn opens his article with a claim that demands our assent: "Few disabled Catholics have been involved in the theology of disability; as a result, our experience has not entered the Church's self-understanding." How can theology speak of disability if people with disabilities do not study theology? How can the Church understand disability if people with disabilities do not fully enter its life?
This painful observation aims not to blame people with disabilities for their ability or inability to study theology, but rather to reflect on an ecclesial practice still often blocked by heavy mental and doctrinal obstacles. "The 1917 Code of Canon Law," Glyn writes, "stipulated that those with physical impediments, the 'epileptic, demented, or possessed' could not receive priestly ordination (nn. 984-986). Although the 1983 Code abrogated this provision, traces of that thinking remain" in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and especially in the life of our parishes.
I wonder if we should abandon a theology of disability in favor of a theology from disability.
Ecclesial practice is driven by two approaches to disability, both wrong: one engages in the "care" of people as a praiseworthy act, while the other regards people with disabilities as innocent "suffering souls," destined to endure for the benefit of others. Both distort the reality of disabled people and fail to situate them as active members in the full fabric of parish life, valued in their difference.Drawing on personal references, Glyn's article demands a necessary equal dignity within the people of God, because "it makes no sense to hold a view that considers disabled people 'privileged' or 'disadvantaged' because of sin (present or absent), regardless of baptism or any choice on their part." Here emerges the heavy theological question the Church must learn to answer. I believe that if the Church cannot speak theologically about disability, then it is the Church's theology that has a disability; if theology cannot speak of God while understanding disability, then theology itself is disabled. It shows an embarrassing incapacity. We need robust theological thought about disability—thought that welcomes the many questions that arise and gives them the dignity of genuine theology. A radical shift that will transform not only the life of our communities but also our pastoral choices.
What value does disability hold in the life of the Church? What can we learn of God from fragility?
This is precisely the point where the Church's life and the wellbeing of people with disabilities must begin anew. As Father Justin explains, "Grace concerns God's continuous relationship with human beings, with all human beings, who receive the Holy Spirit within themselves and respond to God within the limits of their capacity. No one is excluded, because none of us was conceived to remain outside." I know this may sound obvious, but it is not obvious to certain theological frameworks that describe a person only by his limitation and not as a bearer of Grace.
If we listen to the words of Saint Paul, the paradox is clear: "What is weak in the world, God has chosen to confound the strong" (1 Cor 1:27). "It is plain," Father Glyn continues, "that the image of God shines through all human beings, regardless of their impairments. When it comes to creation or redemption, the Church's teaching no longer distinguishes between people with disabilities and others."
Someone might object that, if this framework holds before physical impairment, it becomes fragile before intellectual or psychological disability. But those of us who, like Justin Glyn, know the power of this extreme fragility can affirm with him that "disability, therefore, is a sign not of defect or privilege, but of God's presence and his solidarity with all of us." He who assumed all human fragility, without distinction.
From this point forward, I see the possibility even of moving beyond Father Justin's article, which stops at the threshold of an understanding that could expand further. I wonder, in fact, whether we should abandon a theology expressed in the genitive case, a theology of disability, as if theology were offering learned discourse about disability. Instead, we should turn toward a theology from disability—discourse about God that begins with disability itself: what does the disability of the person and the person with disability tell us of God? Fragility, I am certain, speaks to us of God more than strength does.
It is unclear why Father Glyn, who clearly lives with a declared disability, does not arrive at the profound awareness that he can understand the mystery of God not despite his disability, but precisely because he is more fragile than other men—exactly as Christ chose to be utterly fragile upon the Cross. If Christ himself, even in his risen state, bears the marks of fragility—indeed, invites us to place our hand there so that we move from doubt to faith—how much more can the human person, weak and in need, show and understand the mystery of the disabled God.
So long as the Church, beginning with its most wounded members, does not discover the theological value of this marginality as a privileged place where God's power reveals itself, we will always have communities that bend (even generously) over disability without recognizing its divine significance. So long as theology and pastoral practice feel that addressing disability is a "problem," they will remain blocked and sterile. Only by asking ourselves what message of God lies in fragility will we discover that it renders us fully human—far more than all those notions of strength, competence, intelligence, or beauty that so many hold in their minds.
Let us hope that theology takes its steps forward, but meanwhile let us learn to tell the signs of God's mystery as it reveals itself when we live fragility. Perhaps theology is missing many of our stories of salvation. Let us open our eyes to see. Let us learn to tell.