The Church recognizes that every parish community includes members with disabilities and earnestly desires their active participation. . . . Catholic adults and children with disabilities, and their families, earnestly desire full and meaningful participation in the sacramental life of the Church.[1]
The parish is where the local Church lives as family, called together by the Lord, amidst all the peace, goodness, beauty, joys, struggles, and sufferings of this world.[2] People with impairments belong in our families and parishes,[3] and the US bishops in their teaching about disciples with impairments and their families, highlight the essential role of the parish, the local and visible expression of the Eucharistic community.[4] This invitation to think not only about individuals but about the whole parish family is instructive and offers an opportunity to reimagine aspects of catechesis.
Turning to the Directory for Catechesis, we similarly find an exposition of multiple facets of the parish and sacramental life, including emphases on: staying close to families of people with impairments, solidarity, inclusion, shared ministry, and a recognition that people with impairments are not passive but active members of the parish.[5] I suggest that the Directory also encourages us to consider that the above characteristics are to be grounded in a fraternal and deeply personal love embodied in close Christian community—not just on Sundays but on each day of the week and not only in parish buildings but wherever Christians gather. We might consider what such love in the parish could look like through four interrelated perspectives on the ordinary, conversion, friendship, and new life.
The Ordinary
While it may sound odd to phrase it this way, the parish is to be for us an ordinary environment—that is, a normative expression of our shared life as Church.[6] And in that sense, to the degree that human impairment is part of this world, we lose out on some of the richness of this ordinary life when those with impairments and their families are separated physically or socially from the parish, perhaps in subtle or unrecognized ways[7] (such as not being made welcome at Mass or at parish events or being left out of parish planning), and pushed behind forbidding walls of strangeness, to adapt a phrase from Miguel Romero.[8] In contrast, a family unity among Catholics with and without impairments, lived out in the Church and the parish, should be a quite ordinary and usual exercise of faith that simultaneously provides a profoundly attractive witness to fellow Christians and to the world.[9]
Such unity is a striking illustration of Pope Leo XIV’s motto: “In the One, we are one.” Working together as a parish family to overcome some of the social barriers and negative stereotypes surrounding impairment and impaired people is a beautiful mission consistent with the Gospel and the witness of the apostolic Church. The communal tasks of discovering and embracing each other’s gifts no matter how out of sight, of listening closely for new voices of peace no matter how muted, and of dismantling social walls no matter how high can help a parish to flourish as a community of love (1 Cor 12:4–11).
Imagine a parish breakfast at which it goes without saying that some enjoying the food and company need help with eating or with having a conversation. Picture a gift bearer at Sunday Mass whose speech is to some extent inarticulate as a result of a traumatic brain injury, or an altar server or lector who is a regular at the Sunday Mass but sometimes takes him- or herself off the schedule due to the cyclical nature of a psychiatric disorder, or a faith formation team with a catechetical leader who uses a wheelchair.[10] All this and more should be ordinary for the parish.