Francis & Me: Last time, I promise!

I’m offering some reflections again from Pope Francis, in part because they resonated with my homily of a couple of weeks ago, using Fr Joseph Tetlow, SJ, as my jumping off point.  The Pope’s comments come from his “Message for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.”

          His personal “jumping off point” was a phrase for this year’s celebration:  Building Back Better.  The question is how we can restore “normalcy” to our lives in a post-COVID context, while making things better by means of inclusion and active participation for all people, especially people with disabilities, to reject the threat of the throwaway culture.

          Is there a tendency to regard people with developmental or mental or physical handicaps to be shunted away?  Sadly, there is a cultural tendency even if at the civil level laws fostering inclusion are more and more effective.  Perhaps in a different kind of way, the main example of “shunting away” is with a different kind of handicap:  that of old age.  Our nursing homes and memory care facilities are filled with lonely people…

          Are people with, for example, Down Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy, who are blind or deaf, oftentimes victims?  “We see it in attitudes of rejection, due also to a narcissistic and utilitarian mentality, that give rise to marginalization that ignores the inevitable fact that frailty is a part of everyone’s life.”  The Pope is reminding us that human dignity is innate in all of us, regardless of how “useful” society might regard us as being.  He also “…strongly reaffirm[s] the right of persons with disabilities to receive the sacraments, like all other members of the Church.”  And why not, if they too are beloved children of God?

          Years ago there was a TV documentary called “Who are the DeBolts, and where did they get 19 kids?”  This is a family that adopted a number of “handicapped” children and gave them a loving home where they could thrive.  In the course of a scene with the kids playing in the backyard swimming pool, narrator Henry Winkler asked a series of important questions:  if having a handicap means some kind of inability—can’t see, can’t hear, can’t walk; what about can’t laugh, or can’t love?  Who really is the one who is handicapped?” 

          COVID is reminding us that we are all filled with frailties, weaknesses, limitations.  Might our “new normal” include a heightened respect for others since we share the same mortality, even if in different degrees?  Responses to the pandemic have been mixed as the human race is mixed:  wonderful examples of self-sacrifice and sad examples of self-centeredness.  It would be wonderful if we could reduce the latter, embrace the former, and expand our lived experience of common sonship and daughtership in God to all our brothers and sisters.  This is Pope Francis’ vision; it’s a vision worth praying over and seeking to implement.