Rome, Italy, Oct 19, 2017 / 03:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A leading expert on faith and disabilities has said that people with disabilities are an essential aspect of the Church’s life and mission, and that parishes which exclude them are “incomplete.”
“It’s important to say from the very beginning that any parish that doesn’t have people with disabilities in it, is an incomplete body of Christ…their full capacity to evangelize and catechize is impoverished,” Cristina Gangemi told CNA Oct. 18.
Gangemi is co-director of The Kairos Forum, and an expert in pastoral care for people with intellectual disabilities. She has partnered with the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization to host a conference on catechesis for people with disabilities.
The conference, titled “Catechesis and Persons with Disabilities: A Necessary Engagement in the Daily Pastoral Life of the Church,” will take place Oct. 20-22 at the Pontifical Urbanianum University in Rome.
Gangemi told CNA that “to have everybody the same doesn’t celebrate the beauty of diversity, because one thing that we’re all the same in, one true moment of equality, is that we’re all different.”
But, she said, when people with disabilities participate in parish life, it is sometimes “presumed by the priest…that they don’t have the learning capacity to be able to be prepared for First Communion or the Sacraments.”
While people with disabilities are often described as having “learning difficulties,” Gangemi said the reality is actually the reverse: “the problem is that there are lots of teaching difficulties.”
She noted that many resources used in catechetical preparation for the reception of the sacraments are not adapted to the learning styles of intellectually disabled people, who frequently learn best through action, drama, art and music.
“So we’ve got this paradox. You’ve got people with disabilities who long to receive the sacraments, who from the moment of their conception are touched by God’s grace, and so therefore are called to the sacraments, and then you’ve got this problem in parish structures where nobody really knows how to make all their programs accessible.”
Because people with disabilities often struggle to learn using traditional methods, “the presumption is they can’t be catechized.”
The heart of catechesis and evangelization is essentially “the echoing down of faith from one generation to another, from one person to another in the parish,” she said. “And as for evangelization, everybody, no matter who they are, holds the capacity to be an agent of evangelization.”
Pointing to another example, Gangemi recalled the story of a 50-year-old man with disabilities at a parish in London, who at every Mass, during the consecration or when people went up for Communion, would extend his hand toward the altar and make unintelligible sounds.
Typically the man’s caretakers would tell him to be quiet and not to make noise. However, one day as the man was watching others receive Communion, he again reached out his hand and said, “Why not me?”
“This reaching out for 40-45 years, watching everybody go up to Communion and come back again, was his longing for the Eucharist,” Gangemi said. “And if you think of what Jesus did and what Jesus said, he made a special focus on people who are left out.”
“His lament, ‘why not me?’ was no different than the psalmists and the people that were exiled. So I think that’s got to stop, my hope is that that will stop, she said.”
In 2016, Pope Francis told an Italian group that excluding anyone from parish life because of a disability is wrong, stressing that it is better to “close the door” of a parish than to exclude the disabled.
Disability catechesis, Gangemi said, is not simply about making sure people with disabilities have access to the Sacraments, but is more broadly focused on “how can we ensure that every single person, born and baptized, can be an agent of evangelization and can have the faith echoed down to them so that they can echo down the faith to others.”
“People with disabilities who become active in the Church through their own creative skills then become people that can evangelize to others and call others to salvation,” she said.
The catechetical conference was proposed in 2016 by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Council for the New Evangelization, and approved personally by Pope Francis. Gangemi, who has a number of family members with disabilities, was invited to help organize the event because of previous Vatican conferences on disabilities she’d arranged.
So far, 420 people who work in catechesis have signed up, coming from professions and countries all over the world. Archbishop Fisichella, Baroness Sheila Hollins of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and representatives from dioceses around the world will present methods for the catechesis of disabled people. Participants will also have an audience with Pope Francis on day two of the event, demonstrating the Pope’s keen interest in the topic.
In her comments to CNA, Gangemi called the conference “historic,” since it is among the first global events to address the topic of catechizing those with intellectual disabilities.
Gangemi is also partnering with the Archdiocese of Newark’s office for Pastoral Ministry for Persons with Disabilities, to launch a parish training course on catechesis for the disabled.
The goal, she said, is to engage people so as to “try to make a shift in the way we see and think” about disability, “because the Catholic Church teaches that all life is gift.”
“That’s our starting point: all life is gift,” she said, and voiced her hope that the conference would be “the beginning, and that those of us who live now will leave a legacy for those to come, that it won’t die.”
[…]
The Vatican’s Response: “A day late and a dollar short.”
My advice to the Vatican: Don’t bother; the People of God are already on it.
The dollar short being: this was primarily an offence aimed against God; it was a Luciferian anti-liturgy.
In 2024 and of Paris we read: “…there should not be allusions ridiculing the religious convictions of many people.”
In 1938 and in Munich Chamberlain said it was ‘Peace for our time’ and Hitler said he had ‘No more territorial demands to make in Europe.”
At all levels civilization is up for grabs, and we delineate the limits to “freedom of expression.”
Yes, and “many” people is actually several billion people, which is not a small thing.
Kudos to Bishop Barron for getting on this without waiting for everybody else to go first.
True that!
I’m not sure how this letter can be characterized as coming “from the Vatican” — i.e., from the pope’s administration.
The story says that the signatories were “led by Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke,” who was expelled from his Vatican apartment and denied his Vatican paycheck by Bergoglio just this past November.
If the letter originated from the Vatican hierarchy, I hardly think that Cardinal Burke, who is viewed with such contempt by Bergoglio, would be among the signers.
brineyman, please take note that this piece emanated from CNA. For me, that explains all. If you peruse so many of the “news stories” of CNA, they pretty much all make reference in one fashion or another to “the Vatican” – as if the Catholic Church was synonymous with the Vatican.
Not the same letter, but TWO totally different letters (the first was an “open letter” on July 30, and the more recent was an email(!) from “the Holy See” as the home base of the Church but also a sovereign state like the nation-states participating in the Olympics.
About the possibility of the second communication from, say, the pope, yours truly made this earlier comment:
“Or, maybe NOT a direct response from Pope Francis or from any pope? Would such an action be twisted to confer a kind of equivalence and legitimacy to a tribe of lunatics floating through Paris or wherever?
“Another proposition is that the Holy Spirit already works in subtle but concrete ways…
“The demand for an apology [the first letter] comes from bishops from around the world (just as the Olympic Games include nations from around the world). And the demand was possibly fostered by Cardinal Burke who, by incoherent circumstance, no longer lives in the Vatican. And, therefore, now is more free to say what must be said without engaging in an historic pissing contest between the perennial Catholic Church and moral mutants feeding on what’s left of the West.
“The brief letter also evangelizes clearly and concisely, in only a few sentences, rather than in thousands of unread words on Vatican letterhead. The only fly in the ointment (fly, so to speak), is the earlier Vatican blessing of irregular “couples” under Fiducia Supplicans… butt surely pairs of drag queens are not to be excluded.
“Better that oblique harmonizers of “polarities” stay out of this.”
Paolo below references a release from the Vatican Press Office. NO ONE apparently signed the release. No office of the Vatican is identified. Not only that. It does not mention Francis. NO names are mentioned. In its entirety (Italian followed by English translation)
olympiques de Paris 2024
Created: 03 August 2024
Hits: 19
Holy See Press Office Bulletin
Le Saint-Siège a été attristé par certaines scènes de la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux Olympiques de Paris et ne peut que se joindre aux voix qui se sont élevées ces derniers jours pour déplorer l’offense faite à de nombreux chrétiens et croyants d’autres religions.
Dans un événement prestigieux où le monde entier se réunit autour de valeurs communes ne devraient pas se trouver des allusions ridiculisant les convictions religieuses de nombreuses personnes.
La liberté d’expression, qui, évidemment, n’est pas remise en cause, trouve sa limite dans le respect des autres.
© http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino.html – August 3, 2024
The Holy See was saddened by some scenes of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris and can only join the voices that have been raised in recent days to deplore the offense caused to many Christians and believers of other religions.
At a prestigious event where the whole world unites around common values, there should be no allusions that ridicule the religious beliefs of many people.
Freedom of expression, which is obviously not in question, finds its limit in respect for others.
This CNA piece is confounding as it appears to be reporting on more the press release. This CNA news piece appears to conflate the earlier open letter with Burke, Barron, etc.
I would like to see the whole document. If anyone has a link to it share it please.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/Gioacchino-Genovese.pdf
I apologize, the provided web address is not relevant. Here is the correct one I could access:(https://www.ilcattolico.it/catechesi/documenti-catechesi/communique-du-saint-siege-pour-les-jeux-olympiques-de-paris-2024.html)
Thank you!
A perfectly secular statement which could be done by any bureaucrat. (The objective reality i.e. blasphemy is swapped with “hurt feelings” which “nice people” should not cause.)
“Saddened”? Why not outraged? Among the episcopal signatories, I trust that the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio stood out as prominently as John Hancock’s on the Declaration of Independence. Then again . . .
Yes. If Francis put his John Hancock there, it’s in invisible ink. Perhaps the magician will come out from under the white cloak and call the ‘nothingness’ into objectively sensible, visible being. We dream.
It took 10 days, this statement is really nothing, and we still have yet to hear from the Pope himself.
…who is he to judge?
Curious….first al Azhar university in Cairo condemns then President Erdoğan of Turkey and finally The Holy See….curiouser and curiouser Your Holiness.
Or maybe not in the Vatican Wonderland.
The plot thickens…
About Al-Azhar, it was the grand imam Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb of Al-Azhar who co-signed with Pope Francis the Abu Dhabi Declaration (2019), which affirmed: “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”
Two points:
FIRST, the Sheikh was reported in 2019 as having a following of 150 million Muslims, but not the full 1.5 billion members of sectarian Islam as reported or implied now (but only ten percent).
SECOND, while the Declaration has been questioned on its ambiguity about a “pluralism” of (equivalent?) religions as “willed” rather than only permitted by God, it could also be questioned what, exactly, is meant by a pluralism of sexes? Only a ghostwriter editing oversight, or more like a “wardrobe malfunction” at an infamous Superbowl halftime?
About this fluidly inclusive term (plurality of sexes, as in gender theory?), was it this insane sin seen sailing the Seine scene?
Glad the Vatican was so prompt in responding to the Parisian disgrace. Guess they had to fit in the “Querido Jimmy” letter from “Francesco” first.
I don’t know and have no time to investigate. It seems, in this article, CNA confuses two different things. Imagine a cross of MSNBC with Fox, reporting truth.
CNA website seems to suggest that EWTN sponsors, operates or supports CNA in some manner. Can we trust CNA as a reliable news source? I wonder. Do they receive any funds from the Vatican? What editorial process is used to verify stories which writers at CNA put forth? Anyone?
Meiron, I do not understand the assumptions behind the questions. Catholic News Agency is owned by EWTN; the home page identifies them as a “service of EWTN News.” So that relationship has always been clear to me but maybe not to others? As far as I know, EWTN does not get funding from the Vatican, although they do seem to have a broadcasting agreement regarding Vatican events.
I have not seen a serious reason to doubt the basic integrity of CNA’s reporting. Some stories are better than others, and they may occasionally get something wrong but not at an especially high rate. Have you seen something suggesting that EWTN or CNA has an agends in the way they are reporting Vatican-related news? It is possible that I am misunderstanding your post so I wanted to ask.
Having read this 3x, I conclude:
The beginning of the article says “the Vatican… issued a statement.” The second paragraph states the statement was “e-mailed. Many folks may reasonably consider a statement transmitted by e-mail to equivocally refer to an “e-mail letter,’ an “e-mail,” or a “letter”. In fact, the Vatican Press Office released its statement and classified it as a Press Office Release.
The final three paragraphs refer to the distinct letter signed by Burke and other bishops. The ‘signatories’ to that letter are not signatories to the Press Release. NO signatories whatsoever occur on the Press Release.
The name of Francis? Notable by absence…like Biden at the debate….
I would boycott this olympics. But if you need an olympics “fix” watch the movie “The Boys in the Boat”. Based on a true story about a US Olympic Crew team from the 1930’s. Excellent and worth the time.
“Vatican deplores Olympic offense”. Could that mean the costuming and choreography weren’t done well?
Perhaps it’s time for Rome to reaffirm the complementary roles of apologetics and dialogue in spreading the Gospel.
Meiron above – That’s French, not Italian.
Just sayin’.
Thanks, Cleo. Next time, can you help spot my error before I make it? Très reconnaissant!
As a side note, I went looking for the entire text of the press release Sunday morning after catching up with the news because the reports seemed too fragmentary to understand. “Surely there must be more to it, at least more context,” I thought. (I was wrong.). Reuters reported that a statement in French (which is an unusual choice) had been emailed on Saturday night. That made me chuckle because it reminded me of the infamous Friday afternoon information dump practiced by many presidential administrations when they had to deliver bad news and wanted to attract as little attention as possible.
The statement was hard to find, perhaps because it was only in French at that point and I wasn’t looking on French-language sites. A quich search of the Vatican site came up empty. I finally found it later that day on the Italian site Messainlatino. Any confusion caused by this Vatican statement seems (to me) to come from the Vatican itself, not the news agencies reporting on it. There just isn’t much substance there.
John Allen credits the President of Turkey for the Vatican statement, as their prez announced ahead of time, publically to his cabinet, that he was calling Francis, and then did a release confirming the call and its contents, leaving the Vatican on hook to not leave the prez in the public breeze as a possible liar if him ignored, and the Vatican wanting good diplomatic relations with real a real power in the Muslim world…so, we get a note from the diplomats, Francis saying,”handleithandleithandleit.” And a note bemoaning only our poor precious widdle hurt feelings.