To the Disabled (10 September 1984)
ShareOn Monday, 10 September 1984, the Holy Father visited the “ François Charon” Rehabilitation Center where he addressed the disabled. While suffering is itself an evil, introduced into the world by sin, it can lead to good. “But God shows us how to draw good from evil by offering this suffering as it is felt today, with the Cross of Christ.”
1. I have greatly desired this personal meeting with you who are tested in your body by illness or accidents. I would like to greet each and every one of you, and all those who surround you with their affection and their mutual help, who contribute to making you love life and to making it blossom in you as a gift from God: parents, friends and all the staff of this house. Beyond you, I greet the other handicapped people - men and women - of this region of Quebec and those of Canada. Following Jesus of Nazareth, I wish to be close to you, and also to deepen with you the spiritual meaning of your suffering and your hope of living fully.
2. First of all, I spontaneously express my admiration, my congratulations, my encouragement to those who organized this Center and ensure its daily operation. The name of François Charon is already very evocative: during the century of the founders, he experienced illness, and he decided to abandon his lucrative fur business to devote his efforts and his money to the underprivileged: children, orphans, cripples, the elderly, the infirm, aiming at both care, education and obtaining a trade. Did not his charity house become the Montreal General Hospital?
And today, after the merger five years ago of two somewhat similar institutions, the François Charon Centre aims to be at the forefront of science, technology and pedagogy to offer its physical and psychosocial rehabilitation services to a growing number of physically disabled adults in eastern Quebec.
Not only do they find there advanced instruments and methods of functional rehabilitation, but also the means to acquire all possible autonomy in their own environment, and professional reclassification for integration into society. For this, your teams include specialists from all branches, working according to a philosophy that seeks to give everyone equal opportunities and equal human dignity. It is wonderful, and I hope that scientists continue to invent everything that can effectively relieve suffering.
But these tools and this skill, dear staff members, would not succeed in helping the disabled to flourish without the dedication, attention, support, and human warmth that they also need, and I know that you provide them in this House. I am struck by the youth of the employees, driven by an ideal of service, who bring here their availability and their dynamism. Nor do I forget the many volunteers who, through their visits, here and at home, ensure a climate of friendship and service.
What also deserves encouragement is the concern of this company to integrate the spiritual dimension into its work of human rehabilitation. The sign of this is this beautiful chapel in the heart of the Center. Thus all those who wish can meditate there before the Lord, participate in the Eucharist, meditate and sing with others, meet the priest and those who participate in the activity of the pastoral office. The person forms a whole - body and soul - and each personal event - trial, effort or healing - is linked to the spiritual.
Yes, I express my best wishes for the qualified service of this Center, and of other similar centers in Quebec.
3. I see in this a sign of the value that this people know how to give to the dignity of disabled people, despite the seduction that the modern world feels for productivity, profit, efficiency, speed, records of physical strength.
Our societies, thank God, seem to be gradually becoming aware of the place of the disabled. They have rights that have often been neglected. The United Nations published a declaration on these rights on December 9, 1975, which deserves our praise. It also declared 1981 the International Year of Disabled Persons. But these good intentions must be embodied in the realities of each region, and there are material difficulties and psychological obstacles to overcome, and progress to be made.
The Church has always been interested in this in the first place, and over the centuries she has brought to fruition works of great generosity to help, like Christ, the disabled, convinced of the unique value of each person. On 4 March 1981, the Holy See published a long document which reaffirms the fundamental principles and lines of action ( Document of the Holy See , 4 March 1981: "L'Osservatore Romano", editio gallica, 1981) . I like to repeat here with clarity and vigour: the disabled person is a human subject in his own right, with all the corresponding rights, innate, sacred and inviolable, whether he is so by infirmity, from birth or as a result of chronic illnesses, accidents, as well as by mental debility or sensory infirmity, and whatever the importance of his injuries. It is necessary to facilitate his participation in the life of society in all its dimensions and at all levels accessible to his possibilities: family, school, work, social, political and religious community. In practice, this presupposes absolute respect for the human life of the disabled person, from conception and at all stages of his development.
We must not only seek to overcome disabilities, but also their causes. They often have natural causes, malformation of the organism or illness; we also think of war, pollution, alcohol or drug abuse, careless driving. And again of psychological and moral causes: a spiritual “ecology” is necessary in the same way as a natural ecology. We must help families who are often helpless and very deserving, and for this we must create reception centers like this one, concerned with ties with the family. We must aim to provide training, suitable employment with fair pay, opportunities for promotion and security conditions that avoid the easy trauma of the disabled: this requires imagination and audacity, for all kinds of social initiatives, with the help of public authorities. I devoted an entire paragraph of my encyclical on work to this (Ioannis Pauli PP. II, Laborem Exercens , 22). Ultimately, it is important that the disabled person is not only assisted and loved, but that he becomes, as much as possible, aware of his dignity, his resources, his possibilities of wanting, of communicating, of collaborating, of loving, of giving in turn, by fighting every day to maintain and develop his capacities.
Ultimately, the quality of a society or a civilization is measured by the respect it shows to its weakest members. A technically perfect society, in which only fully productive members are admitted, should be considered radically unworthy of man, perverted by a kind of discrimination no less reprehensible than racial discrimination. The disabled person is one of us, participating in our very humanity. Recognizing and promoting his dignity and rights is recognizing our own dignity and rights.
These are the convictions of the Church ( Document of the Holy See , March 4, 1981: "L'Osservatore Romano", Gallica edition, March 1981) , which she is pleased to see shared and put into practice in a good number of legislations and societies.
4. But, dear friends, the Christian draws from his faith even deeper motives and a particular strength for this work in favor of the handicapped.
The Gospel shows us Jesus passing by doing good. He welcomed all those who suffered physically or morally; he even went to meet them. He announced to them the Good News of God's love and of their salvation through faith. And in this salvation, he aimed at the body and the soul at the same time. By comforting the infirm - the crippled, the paralyzed, the blind, the deaf - he wanted to tear them away from their misery, and their healing, in response to their faith, was the sign of the full life that he announced: "Rise and walk!"
He was not content to be close to suffering and to relieve it, he took it upon himself. He voluntarily became the man of sorrows, familiar with suffering, and finally with that of the tortured, of those condemned to death. Because he thus offered his life, he, the beloved Son of the Father, God resurrected him, and Christ thus opened the doors of Life to us. He guarantees us that life will have the last word.
The message he left us is that you, the disabled, seek with Him to fight against evil, to overcome the obstacles that your body suffers from, with the help of technology and science, and with the courage of love.
It is also that we become good Samaritans for one another (Ioannis Pauli PP. II, Salvifici Doloris , 28-30) not only by stopping near the man who suffers the wounds of life, but by bringing him effective help, by giving ourselves to this man with whom Christ identifies himself: “Whatever you did to one of my brothers, you did it to me”.
5. I have spoken so far, dear Brothers and Sisters in Jesus Christ, of the nobility of this tenacious struggle against physical evil, with what it supposes of technical competence, courage, solidarity and hope. And such is indeed the will of God.
But the mystery of your suffering is deeper, and I would like to descend into it with you, as I did in my letter of 11 February this year, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes: “At the heart of all suffering experienced by man... the question inevitably arises: why? It is a question about the cause, the reason; it is at the same time a question about the goal and, ultimately, about the meaning” ( Ibid . 9). “Each person almost always enters into suffering with a completely human protest and by asking himself the question “why”... ( Ibid . 27). He addresses this question to God, like Job, and he also addresses it to Christ. Even if he identifies the secondary cause which has caused his handicap, even if he hopes to overcome it and if he actually succeeds in doing so with his will and the means of rehabilitation, the subjective problem remains: why this suffering, this limitation in me, at a particular period of my life? This mystery accompanies us, as it accompanies all human trials and human work itself. Christ responds, in a certain way, from his Cross, in the depths of his own suffering. It is not an abstract response; it is a call, which man takes time to hear.
Christ gave a universal redemptive value to his own suffering, which seemed to be imposed on him from outside; he took it on in obedience to his Father, in love for men, to free them from their sin which is the cause of suffering and death. And we ourselves participate in this Redemption, if we consent to it. This consent is neither fatality nor resignation to suffering which remains in itself an evil and which obliges us to struggle. But God shows us how to draw good from evil by offering this suffering as it is felt today, with the Cross of Christ. I am sure that many of you have had or are having this experience here, in faith. The pain remains. But the heart receives serenity and peace. It overcomes the feeling of the uselessness of suffering. It opens itself to love. It helps the people around it to come out of themselves, to give themselves. It is a witness to faith and hope. He believes, in the mystery of the communion of saints, that he is useful for the salvation of his brothers and sisters throughout the world. He enters into the redemptive mission with Christ.
For this moving testimony, we thank the disabled, and all those who discreetly accompany them on their spiritual journey. It is important that the disabled and sick help each other in associations, not only to humanize their living conditions and assert their rights, but to better access this mystery. No one can impose their faith, but everyone can live and bear witness to it, and bring new inspiration and dynamism to the heart of health establishments: Blessed are those who understand this language of the beatitudes! Human suffering is therefore a force that can contribute to transforming the world.
6. Yes, with Christ you must love life: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” ( Io . 10, 11). The natural life of your bodily organism, of its rehabilitated functions, of its senses; the life of the intellectual faculties and the capacities for love. But also the more mysterious, supernatural life that God places in believers through baptism, which is his divine Life, participation in his Trinitarian life. It is not dependent on physical handicaps; it even contrasts with the weakness of the body. This life is invisible to the eyes, but it gives people their inner beauty and their secret strength; it remains and flourishes beyond this earthly life. And the greatness of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and reconciliation, is to introduce us into this Life. This chapel is the privileged place for it.
7. This, dear friends, is the essence of the message of the Bishop of Rome present among you.
Here, you seem to me to be particularly helped, trained to rediscover the taste for life. I cannot help but think - and this is a prayer intention that I entrust to you - of all the other handicapped people in this country, in the world; of the mentally handicapped; of the seriously ill, of those who have injuries such that there is no human hope of improvement and who have the right to the same respect for life; of the defenceless handicapped, unborn children and the elderly, to whom I would like to lend my voice: "We have the right to be born, we have the right to live!" I think of the countries too poor to still be able to organise rehabilitation centres like this one.
We are all united in the suffering of our brothers and sisters and, as I said on the threshold of the International Year of Disabled People (1 January 1981): “If only a small part of the budget earmarked for the arms race were devoted to this objective, we could achieve significant successes and alleviate the plight of many suffering people”.
8. Before leaving you - and I will cherish the memory of this visit - I express my affection and encouragement to the disabled people of this Centre. I also say this to their families and to all the deserving staff of this House. The Second Vatican Council recognized in such a presence of charity the vital center of the lay apostolate ( Apostolicam Actuositatem , 8). I think also of the men and women religious who have dedicated their lives to the service of the disabled, and of all the priests who bring them effective signs of Christ's love.
The Apostle Peter said to the lame man at the Beautiful Gate: “I have neither silver nor gold; in the name of Jesus Christ, arise and walk!” This power to heal miraculously belongs to Jesus Christ. Today, the successor of Peter thanks you for your welcome and your witness, and he hopes that his time among you will have helped to strengthen your faith, this faith that enlightens, expands and elevates your life. I ask Mary, our Mother, to obtain for you this gift of the Holy Spirit. And I pray to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to fill you with his blessings.
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