There is much to say about how the Church welcomes people with disabilities — much that is good, since the Church has done real work here across the centuries, and much that is troubling. Walk into our churches and you'll see almost no handicapped people at all.
We need to acknowledge this plainly and ask forgiveness of all our brothers and sisters still standing outside. Why don't they come forward? Why don't they come on their own? The church door stands open to everyone, after all.
But for them to join the "feast" to which Jesus invited all people, someone has to go and find them. Someone has to show them they are wanted — that, as we say so often and so well, the first place belongs to them.
Many stay outside because that open door says nothing anymore to those who have lost the sense of the "feast"
The sad truth is different: many of them and their parents remain outside because that open door says nothing anymore to those who have lost the sense of the "feast".Many parents, when they understood their child was "different," fell into a catastrophe that most often meant closing themselves off — away from others, from friends, from church, from God.
Those who believed but did not practice their faith, facing such cruel fortune, could only say: "There. Now I have proof that God does not exist. If he does exist, how could he allow such a thing?"
Those who were lukewarm, uncertain, practiced religion only from habit, became convinced that this God — known so little — had abandoned them. Why seek him after such proof?
Those who believed with greater conviction felt rebellion against God perhaps more strongly than the others. "How could he do this to us, who always did what we were supposed to do?"
It is easy to see how these three responses collapse into a single cry of pain that belongs to all of us, that makes us feel like poor human beings, poor mothers and fathers, struck in what we hold most dear. And because it is hard to blame human beings, it is easier to blame God, the Author of life, and accuse him of being guilty.
It doesn't matter that the cause was a virus, or forceps, or fever, or trauma.
It doesn't matter that Jesus, the Son of God, came to show his special love precisely for our children who are "like this".
It doesn't matter that he is there waiting for us, weeping with us on the cross.
What matters — what has broken us open — is the wound in our hearts as mothers and fathers, a wound that cries out in silence, in loneliness, in fear, in despair, and finds no answer.
Jesus entrusted that answer to our brothers and sisters: "Do this in memory of me," he said. "Whatever you did for one of the least of these..."
Many of our brothers and sisters, who have not been tested as we have, know this answer well. They want to show it to us, but they don't know how to find the path, the right way, the fitting words, the best behavior. They are afraid. They have other things to do. Or simply, they don't know.
So we can all make an effort together. Some have already begun this journey and know well how easy it is to get to know one another, to share, to reach out and then to celebrate together. If we need them to meet the Lord again, how much more do they need to see the gaze of our handicapped children in order to rediscover the gaze of God. Then that answer — without which we remain bereft — we will seek together, because only when we are all together, and no one is left outside, will it be possible to build the true Church and to ensure that the one sent "to free the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18) was not sent in vain.
But we must hurry. We cannot delay or put it off any longer, because, as the mother of a severely handicapped daughter says, "sometimes loneliness and suffering can lead where you never want to go."
-by Mariangela Bertolini, 1984