The subtle lure of "ableism"

The vote in favor of New York state's assisted suicide bill had me digging up a short talk I offered at an archdiocesan gathering of disability advocates here in New Orleans when I first arrived. With some modifications (owing to the format, not the content), I share it here with you:

I imagine that part of what you will be doing this morning is discerning helpful ways to use media in the service of faith and prayer. And some of you are able to do that because media technology are being used in a helpful way. My community, the Daughters of St. Paul, isn’t just about selling books as a way of supporting ourselves; we are committed to evangelizing with the media, and we have a publishing house, Pauline Books and Media. But there's more to it even than that:

 

As Daughters of St. Paul, part of our mission is to make reparation for media that take people away from God, that twist human activity, but also human minds and hearts, and harm individuals and society. 

We have our work cut out for us.

 

In the second Letter to the Corinthians we see how the people of Corinth scorned Paul. He just didn’t measure up to the people they admired: people of eloquence and athletic stamina. Today we have “Instagram perfection” in which any outward disfigurement becomes a disability. 

 

Facing life with a serious disability or at the side of a person with a disability (especially when that is profound) has become almost unthinkable for many people today in part because of how the media have conditioned us: not only our way of seeing people, but the way limitations are typically presented, dealt with, ignored, or abhorred in media. When people with disabilities are represented, they can often be caricatures. 

 

So this morning, I invite you to join me in a prayer of  reparation for media:

• Media that targets vulnerable persons or undermines their dignity in any way;
• Media portrayals that focus on the human person in isolation, the person who defines himself or herself without relationships of love, trust, acceptance, forgiveness;
• Media that promote false ideals of physical flawlessness with Instagram perfection and Photoshopped bodies;
• Media especially that creates addictive experiences for children and young people, some of whom hate their own beautiful, strong, healthy bodies because of what they have seen and perhaps done in imitation of media models.

And let’s pray in intercession for people, especially media influencers, who cannot recognize the dignity of persons with disabilities, and whose media creations spread that narrow vision of the human person like a contagion.

 

 

 

For further reflection:

 

"Really and radically every person must be understood as the event of a supernatural self-communication of God" (FCF 127; Karl Rahner).

  

“God is there in these moments and can give us in a single instant exactly what we need. Then the rest of the day can take its course, under the same effort and strain, perhaps, but in peace. And when night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God’s hands and leave it with Him. Then you will be able to rest in Him—really rest—and start the next day as a new life" (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross).

The French mystic Gabrielle Bossis, in prayer, understood Jesus telling her, “Give Me your suffering. No one can give it to Me in heaven. Give it to Me.”

Hawthorne Dominicans: At the Final Frontier of Evangelization

I got back from Atlanta Monday night, after a full weekend: the Atlanta Archdiocesan Eucharistic Congress (the 20th!), the Catholic New Media Conference (the 8th!), and the hospitality of the Hawthorne Dominicans. Staying on the convent side of their home for terminal cancer patients, I got to witness very briefly how timely is a mission that many might assume a relic of the past but that is instead more contemporary than ever.

Someone recently asked this sister
if she didn't get bored during the day,
watching with cancer patients and standing
at the nurse's station, alert to their needs.
"Bored?! I wish I had some boredom in my life!"

The community, founded by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne), sticks to its original 19th century mission of caring for people with incurable cancer and inadequate financial resources. They don't accept payment of any kind from their patients, family or the government: no Medicare, Medicaid or insurance. The entire 24-patient hospital (like their other homes in New York and Pennsylvania) runs entirely on Divine Providence. There are lay staff, but sister-nurses are on the floors 24/7. A sign at the entrance to the convent portion of the building reminds one to be attentive to noises, since at any time of day sisters might be resting after night duty (or resting up for night duty).

Sister keeping watch with Jesus
during Eucharistic Adoration.

Morning prayers and Mass are early (6:15 on Monday!); after the Mass, Communion is brought to the Catholics who desire to receive. A little procession (a sister ringing a tiny, clear bell announces the approach of the priest or Extraordinary Minister with the pyx) heads from chapel to the patient rooms. I assumed that this daily occurrence would be handled quickly, but I was wrong. The tiny bell was still ringing 40 minutes after Mass one day. They know what's important. A daily holy hour is part of the community's prayer, and when I arrived on a First Friday they were holding all-day adoration, with every sister (some of them elderly and infirm) taking a spot before the Blessed Sacrament. They pray Evening Prayer and Compline together, singing the familiar Gregorian melodies. Community recreations are spent together, and I was invited on those evenings I did not have outside commitments.

Mary shrine in the front gardens.

The patient rooms are large, with full windows that look out onto front or back gardens to which the patients have full access in their wheelchairs or motorized carts. Some of the patients have no family and stay for years, really becoming family. Some of them also become Catholic, and many of those who arrive as non-practicing Catholics return to the sacraments in that peaceful atmosphere. The patients, who receive a high level of palliative care from the Dominicans, are the same people who are being targeted by the various euthanasia campaigns around our country and the world. One of the sisters told me that they have begun hearing slogans about "death with dignity" from patients and their families. Why can't they just take an extra-large dose of sleeping medicine and be done with all this? The sisters' answer is to help the person experience their true dignity in death and dying. They have more than a century of experience accompanying the dying, and their input should be sought in any discussion of "death with dignity" legislation.

A lovely shrine in the front garden.

This is not the only timely dimension of the sisters' charism. How many families have been bankrupted because of medical expenses? How often do people feel they owe it to their family to depart this life quickly, in order to avoid the risk of financial ruin? This is something the sisters address with exquisite charity, not even accepting donations from patients' families.

While the sisters do have some vocations (and they accept "delayed vocations"), they have still had to consolidate homes over the past number of years as their median age rises and sisters have to withdraw from active nursing ("The hardest thing I ever had to do," Sister Mary Martha admitted to me). They have a website and a Facebook page, but social media is not their thing (the Facebook page was last updated on May 30). They are too busy taking care of their patients, all the way to Heaven.

Certified: the largest black
oak in the State of Georgia.
See how it towers over the home!

Even the largest black oak in the State
is subject to the whimsical touch of the local superior!