3 December has a couple of interesting resonances for this blind Jesuit. It is the feast day of St Francis Xavier — Jesuit missionary extraordinaire. It is also the International Day of Persons with a Disability. It seems to me that the two anniversaries have more than a little in common — both in what they tell us about the limits and the promise of human life in the image of God.
Xavier, as I have suggested elsewhere, is a very complicated person. This Basque noble was able to see Christ present in anyone, regardless of race or class, and eminently available to push boundaries (physical and spiritual) in the name of the God of Love. He insisted on Jesuits inculturating — learning the languages of those they wished to serve and understanding something of their communities.
However, he was also definitely very much a man of his time when it came to missing the richness of the cultures among which he moved. His understanding of the absolute need for conversion as end in itself meant that baptisms were more important than community building and the Church he introduced to the locals often viewed them more as targets for discipline than collaborators in the vineyard of the Lord.
The UN’s International Day of Persons with Disability also invites a complex response. Like Xavier, it speaks of a concern for others which transcends borders or historical prejudice. It summons people to a recognition of shared purpose and common humanity — an invitation across psychological and social boundaries that divide even more emphatically than lines on a map. As Pope Francis says in his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti (98):
'I would like to mention some of those "hidden exiles" who are treated as foreign bodies in society. Many persons with disabilities “feel that they exist without belonging and without participating". Much still prevents them from being fully enfranchised. Our concern should be not only to care for them but to ensure their "active participation in the civil and ecclesial community. That is a demanding and even tiring process, yet one that will gradually contribute to the formation of consciences capable of acknowledging each individual as a unique and unrepeatable person".'
Yet, like Xavier, we start from here: from the prejudices and mindsets of our own time. It is easy to sneer at the prejudices of the 16th century Church about salvation of the pagans and horrors (such as the Goan Inquisition) which Xavier indirectly enabled. We, who live in an age of globalised human rights rhetoric, abhor the idea that colonisation and forced conversion could ever have been justified based on differences in faith.
'As with the feast of Francis Xavier, the genuine impulse to holiness and the exhortation to individuals to see beyond the limits of themselves and their society to the potential for a broader unity is something to be celebrated. It is an opportunity to assess and take stock, to see how the rhetoric we proclaim matches the lived reality of our world.'
And yet, to sneer would be to ignore the areas in which our own society — at least implicitly — does not yet regard all of its members as fully human. To sneer would be to ignore the fact that, in contemporary Australia, children with disabilities are caged at school, COVID plans routinely ignore disability and open discussion of eugenics (in the shape of rationing health care based on assumed quality of life) is back in fashion. Australia’s elite forces have been filmed drinking beer from the looted prosthesis of a disabled Afghan killed by the troops and kept as a gruesome trophy. The Royal Commission on Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability has heard harrowing testimony on abuse, segregation, violence and discrimination, finding (in its interim report) that:
'The key issues are often connected to the emerging themes we have identified, suggesting that the violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation experienced by people with disability is not limited to discrete settings or contexts. Rather, violence against, and abuse, neglect and exploitation of, people with disability may be the result of systemic failures across multiple areas.'
In the face of all that it might be easy to be cynical — to argue that one International Day of Persons with Disability a year allows us to be ignored with a clear conscience on the other 364 — just as a celebration of the virtues of Francis Xavier ignores his very real limitations.
I genuinely believe that to do so, however, would be to miss the point. As with the feast of Francis Xavier, the genuine impulse to holiness and the exhortation to individuals to see beyond the limits of themselves and their society to the potential for a broader unity is something to be celebrated.
It is an opportunity to assess and take stock, to see how the rhetoric we proclaim matches the lived reality of our world. It is a given that all of us, with disabilities or not, are limited. Our opportunity to transcend those limits lies not in seeking to deny them but rather, collectively, to flow through them in sharing our limited lives with others as we seek to live in union with God.
Fr Justin Glyn SJ has a licentiate in canon law from St Paul University in Ottawa. Before entering the Society he practised law in South Africa and New Zealand and has a PhD in administrative and international law.
Main image: St Francis Xavier (Wikicommons)