People with disabilities and catechesis : the way forward!

Abstract

For the past thirty years I have been working within the disability sector, both as a physiotherapist in the medical field and in administration with various institutions which provide social services for persons with disabilities in Malta. During these years I have come across parents who expressed a feeling that their children were not being truly welcomed within their respective parish communities as compared to their siblings. This became evident when the children reached the age to start catechesis in preparation for the sacraments of initiation. This experience hurt my sense of social and moral justice and prompted me to engage on a project directed to search for ways to help these children experience the grace of the sacraments and the fullness of Christian life. In Malta, the number of children diagnosed as having various disabilities or different learning abilities is on the increase. In the local education system inclusion of children with disability has been facilitated with the introduction of Leaming Support Assistants (LSA) and other support resources. This gave greater learning opportunities to children with disability and at the same time helped their peers to view life from a different perspective. Guardians of children with disability have found new hope for the future of their dependants in the social setting. This may not be the case within the Church context. For the majority of children who are at the age for the Sacraments of lnitiation, it is the norm for them to attend for catechesis classes in their local parish. They find a warm welcome from catechists who are well prepared to help them integrate in the local church community. The problem arises when the child has some form of learning disability and/or some form of behaviour problems. Very often guardians of a child with disability are faced with the option of either keeping the child at home with the idea that the child is 'holy' and does not require to grow in the Christian faith or else the child is allowed to attend for catechesis if accompanied by one of the guardians (usually the mother.) Catholic Social Teaching sustains the dignity and rights of all children. Integrating a child with disability is fulfilling God's plan. In his letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul talks about the gift of those who seem to be the weaker: "For they are the temple of God: I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people." Thus the Church needs the gifts of those living with disability as much as they need the support and care of the Church. The local parish needs to explore different ways of how to include and assist persons with disabilities in their journey for wholeness and sanctification. The Church, or better still the people of God, need to recognize that persons with disabilities are also searching for deeper meaning to life, longing for a deeper relationship and desiring to know God regardless of his/her physical or intellectual ability. In Valuing Difference people with disabilities in the life and mission of the Church, the Bishops of England and Wales stated: "God loves us as we are, with our own particular gifts and weaknesses. Christ's liberating message of love and hope celebrates difference because He values each and every person as unique and equal." Every person is created in God's image. There is no difference for God whether we are strong or weak; we are all valued as we are. "Christ's liberating message of love and hope celebrates difference because He values each and every person as unique and equal.” Saint John Paul II described a society that excludes people with disability as discriminatory: A society that made room only for its fully functional, completely autonomous and independent members would be unworthy of human being. Discrimination on the basis of effectiveness is just as disgraceful as racial, gender or religious discrimination. In her excellent book Copious Hosting: A Theology of Access for People with Disabilities, Jennie Weiss Block suggests, that of all places, the church should be a model of the accessible community, a point of entry into God's love that is reflected both in thinking and in acting. For as she puts it, "the Body of Christ presumes a place for everyone." One often wonders if this is so within our communities. Society very often refers to accessibility only on the basis of the suitability of a building, whether the person with disability is able to access the place, but 'place' is difficult for persons with disabilities. Thomas E. Reynolds in his book Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality: Far too often such people encounter a symbolic, if not palpably concrete, sign that reads, "Access denied." This is tragic for both persons with disabilities and non-disabled persons. Certain people are excluded from participation, and thus their humanity is diminished. The result also diminishes church communities themselves, as disabling principalities and powers constrict the redemptive work of God. The humanity of nondisabled people is then diminished as well. The Church needs to look differently toward people with disabilities and on the other hand to think differently about them. Reynolds in his book states that: Nurturing communities of abundant hospitality is the goal. However, this means more than the courtesy of providing access points for those otherwise unable to enter and find their way. Hospitality involves actively welcoming and befriending the stranger-in this case, a person with disabilities-not as a spectator, but as someone with inherent value, loved into being by God, created in the image of God, and thus having unique gifts to offer as human being. Yet we are up against complex social forces and theological assumptions that make the task difficult. We need to value our differences and discover what we truly share in our differences. Reynolds continues to state: There is, in the end, no hard-and-fast dualism between ability and disability, but rather a nexus of reciprocity that is based in our vulnerable humanity. All of life comes to us as a gift, an endowment received in countless ways from others throughout our lifetime. When we acknowledge this, the line between giving and receiving, ability and disability, begins to blur. There has been a lot of awareness in Maltese Society with respect to persons with disability. Society has been challenged to recognise the social, cultural and civic rights of people with disabilities as equal members of society and to progressively remove barriers to the exercising of these rights. Although a lot has been already done, we are still in the process of really being an inclusive society. The most significant change in Maltese society was the introduction of inclusive education in the mainstream schools, where some children with disabilities were not segregated from the other peers without disability. In the Church too, a shift of attitude and understanding has begun to take place, but a lot more has still to be done especially with respect to Catechesis. Every parish is taking its own initiative and its own ways of dealing with children with disabilities. The problem is that there are no policies and procedures to help as guidelines for Catechists. The idea of having a support catechist (as compared to the learning support system in schools), still needs to be developed. There is the need for a change in attitude towards persons with disabilities who should no longer be regarded as individuals for whom we need to do something but rather as people with whom we would work while empowering them to make their own choices and discover their gifts for the good of the community and the whole Church. We need to focus more on the person as a gift of God rather than on the disability that he challenges us with. Arne Fritzson, Pastor and Theologian, states: As a person with disability I want to turn to every part of human society and God's church and urge them: Let us share your world! Because your world is also my world and every person's world and because so far, this is the only world there is. We need to define disability beyond the Medical model as this model is based on what non-disabled people think is best for persons with disabilities. It is assumed that the person is defective or deficient and this deficiency is holding the person back from participating fully in society. Hence, disability represents an inability, abnormality or disadvantage calling for management and correction in order to restore the person and become functionable. From a societal perspective this means that all forms of disability legitimately require professional and welfare services. We must therefore supplement the Medical model with a Social model, addressing disability as both a socially constructed category and a matter of human rights. These models are supplementary as it is important not to lose sight of the fact that bodily impairments yield various kinds of physical experiences and personal responses, some of which can be frustrating and painful. By knowing the disability, the abled person is in a better position to intermingle physical/social obstructions in a way that the person with disability can be in a better position to be able to participate in communal life. Among Christians, disability is commonly represented as something to be healed, a helpless person to be cared for, and a cross to bear and an inspiration to others. Indeed, there are biblical precedents for such a presumption. Only one has to open up the New Testament Gospels to find numerous accounts of Jesus healing the lame, deaf, blind and sick. It seems only natural, then, for Christians to suppose that God (1) wishes for human beings to flourish in the fullness of their creaturely capacity and (2) is capable of healing and transforming conditions where such flourishing is impeded or imperilled. After all, is not wholeness part of God's saving plan for humanity? The abled person does not know how to make sense of disability and reconcile the evidential fact of suffering with our faith and affirmation of God's love, power and goodness. Christians are often disturbed and confused when they are confronted by people with disabilities but in reality everyone is disabled one way or another; we all have our own limitations, our own sufferings and finally everyone has to face death. In actual fact we are unsure of ourselves and comfortable in our 'normal' zone. When we encounter disability, we become so confused that we try to hide the disability or try to make it go away. Disability confronts us with different ways of being human and living in the world, rupturing the comfy but precarious assurances that we hold to regarding the purpose of human life. So, we seek to neutralize it by remaking others in the image of our assurances, fixing their brokenness to more adequately reflect what we perceive to be true and valuable-that is what is like us, normal. Reynolds states that "In theological context, such a process is endorsed by linking the conventions of normalcy to God's intention". 14 We need to move away from this perspective and value the person with disability as an integral part of the Christian, community life. The part that people with disabilities play within the Church is not one that we assume or assign to them but a response to the calling given to them from Christ in their baptism. People with cognitive disabilities are not spiritually disabled just because the disability affects the way they learn, the way they communicate with others and the community they belong to. Many parents of children with disabilities sincerely desire to bring their children up in the fullness of the Catholic faith but most of the time they are confused and don't know where to start from. Some parents are afflicted with a sense of loss. Those parents whose children are nonverbal or with severe cognitive deficit, the idea of their children ever receiving the sacraments of initiation or going to mass is far from possible for them. Parents may fear that faith in God and the sacraments of the church are among those gifts that their child can never have. The fact that much of our early development is based on learning on how to attach words to concrete things and events that we encounter, one might assume that children with disabilities are incapable of growing in spiritual life. This is because we tend to confront the spiritual potential of these children on our own terms and not on theirs. Most of the time, language is assumed to be the key to our ability to understand the world around us and gives meaning to our life; the most defining feature of the human being. In the creation of man, Genesis defines the Human being as the most powerful of all creations because of 'language'. So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field. Thus a person whose parts of the brain are not functioning in an ordinary way, causing impaired language or making him non-verbal and thus having difficulty in engaging in typical social relationships or in understanding the world around him, one might think that he is not capable of leading a full spiritual life. This is not the case as studies show that children with severe Autism and other cognitive deficit often compensate for their language deficit by greater reliance on non-verbal, visual, and associative processing. Albert Einstein the German-born theoretical physicist and philosopher of science said that his own style of thinking was nonverbal. The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.