Disabled praised for evangelical gifts

POPE FRANCIS emphasised the evangelical gifts of the disabled when he met thousands of members of Catholic organisations for the blind and the deaf last weekend. The Apostolic Movement for the Blind and the Little Mission for the Deaf were meeting together in Rome to reflect on the culture of encounter in the Gospel.

Pope Francis told them the word “encounter” in their theme presupposes another encounter, the one with Christ. “In effect, to be witnesses of the Gospel, we must have met him, Jesus,” Pope Francis said. “The Samaritan woman – as we read last Sunday – met Jesus, spoke to him, and her life changed. She returned to her people and said ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Messiah?’”

He said the Samaritan woman is the kind of person Jesus loved to make a disciple. The marginalised, the excluded, the despised: it was important for these people to become witnesses to a “new attitude”, which may be called a culture of encounter, he said, comparing this with a culture of exclusion and prejudice typified by the Pharisees who called Jesus and those he healed “sinners”, and believed disability to be God’s will. “In fact, only those who recognise their own fragility and limitations can build fraternal relations and solidarity, in the Church and in society.”

During his Angelus address on Sunday commenting on the gospel reading from John in which Jesus gives sight to the blind man, Pope Francis referred to “those who supposedly have sight but continue to remain blind in their soul”. “While the blind man gradually approaches the light, on the contrary the doctors of the law slip ever deeper into inner blindness,” he said.