I staffed a bishop-delegate in Rome at the 2015 Synod on the Family. Asked, at the time, for possible themes at the next synod, the delegate pressed for (among other ideas) a synod on “what it means to be human.” His reasoning was simple. The key issues facing society and the Church today in the developed world are all anthropological. Who and what is a human being? Is there such a thing as a human “nature”? Do “natural rights” really exist, above and preceding the realm of state authority? What, beyond our intellects, makes us unique among animals? What’s our species’ purpose and meaning, if any?
Briefly put: When we speak of human dignity and the sanctity of life, are we simply telling ourselves a pleasing fairy tale that’s convenient to our vanity—and open to a rewrite if a particular life takes an inconvenient turn?
These questions have stayed with me over the years because, in my own family—as in millions of others—they’re not matters of theory. They’re immediate and practical. My wife and I have a daughter with seven children, two of whom have disabilities. We have a son whose eighteen-year-old daughter has been severely disabled since birth: a young woman unable to speak, wheelchair bound, and fed through a tube. We have another son with Down syndrome, limited language, and a 43 IQ. There’s nothing quite like cleaning up vomit and excrement in a bathroom at 3 a.m. while your disabled adult son lies nude on the floor with a raging fever to put the “value of life” issue in exquisitely sharp focus. And what I’ve just described is mild compared to families we know with far more demanding special-needs circumstances.
God doesn’t make mistakes. For my wife and me, the uniquely beautiful thing in the disabled is the clarity of God’s image in each of them, inviting us to be more than we are; to be the people he created us to be. The lives of the disabled have profound dignity and meaning. They draw us out of our everyday obsessions and make us more genuinely human selves. I offer that observation from very mixed personal experience, with no saccharine piety. Disability can be hard. Very hard. That’s why it’s called a hardship. But it forces each of us to face and answer, for good or for ill, questions of whether and why we should “choose life,” and under what circumstances; questions that lead us directly back to Deuteronomy 30:19.
So where am I going with this? Just here: For the reasons noted above, I have a special disgust for the deceit involved in the abortion cult; for the perverse moralizing and intimate violence at the heart of so-called reproductive rights. As a result, a headline like “Pope takes roses and chocolates to Italy’s abortion pioneer” gets my attention.
The story, dated November 8, appeared in Britain’s Catholic Herald. It details a post made on X by Emma Bonino. Bonino, noted the Herald, is “the Italian politician who successfully campaigned to legalise abortion in the 1970s.” To put it more graphically, she’s co-responsible for her nation’s license to kill millions of developing human children in the womb over the past forty years. Now seventy-six, she was recently hospitalized for health reasons. Francis paid an apparently surprise visit to her home, with gifts, after her release. The pope had earlier described Bonino as one of Italy’s “forgotten greats”—presumably for her work on behalf of foreign migrants. And on X, Bonino added that the pope had again praised her as an example of “freedom and resistance.” In a photo accompanying the post, she and Francis, both in wheelchairs, are seen amiably chatting.
What to make of it? Pope Francis has a record of reaching out personally to the poor, the disaffected, and persons otherwise perceived as enemies. He’s done so since the first months of his papacy. In that, he’s simply following the example of Jesus himself, who dined with sinners and thereby earned the scorn of pharisees. I wasn’t at the meeting. I don’t know what was in the pope’s head. I don’t know how or whether the meeting, in the long run, will affect Bonino who, in any case, bears the same image of God as my disabled son. Nor do I know how accurately she reported the exchange. So barking too loudly about the negative optics of the meeting—and they are negative—may not make much sense.
And yet, the Herald story does remind us of things that are now obvious. The Francis pontificate is a cocktail of compassion and good will; outreach to the margins; laxity in various matters of doctrine and canon law; a seeming resentment of his immediate predecessors and their legacies; a prickly authoritarianism combined with calls for openness and listening; and other internal contradictions—or at least ambiguities. The pope has spoken out against gender ideology and abortion in sometimes strikingly forceful terms. But “sanctity of life” issues have neither the same meaning nor the same stress found in the previous several pontificates. The John Paul II Institute in Rome, a jewel of faithful Catholic thought on matters relating to human sexuality and Christian anthropology, was remodeled with a wrecking ball. A less than inspiring leader (to put it kindly)—Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia—was tasked with overseeing and repurposing the debris.
This sends exactly the wrong message to families like mine. We live in a secular culture increasingly intolerant of “inconvenient” life. Confusion, weird optics, and mixed messaging at the top of the Church are the very last things we need. But that’s too often been our Roman diet for more than a decade.
We Catholics find ourselves in a moment demanding clarity, confidence, and evangelical zeal. We’re not getting it, and its absence fuels my own particular “disability”: anger. Sadly, when it comes to the current Holy Father, deliberate ambiguity seems to be his.
Francis X. Maier, a senior fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church (Ignatius).
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