The Disabled Suffer With Christ

Monday of Holy Week

Bruised Reeds

The Gospel today tells us that the Messiah will not break the bruised reed or extinguish the smouldering wick. In other words, He understands our weakness and treats it with mercy, not vindictiveness. God is particularly respectful of our weak wills and frail intellects. He does not force us to believe in Him or love Him. He is like the good shepherd, not the cruel tyrant.

I would like to talk about bruised reeds today, physically disabled persons. Because the incapacitated and the physically and mentally weak stay out of our way most of the time, we tend to keep them apart, and not remember their needs. The primary need they have is for respect. Every human being is worthy of respect, because every human being has innate, infinite dignity as a being made in the image and likeness of God. That dignity gives them a right to proper treatment and care.

At Holy Week in 2005 we had before us as a nation the face of incapacity and wounded dignity–Terri Schindler Schiavo. The facts of her situation may have been forgotten by most. For over a decade she lived in a mentally disabled state. She was unable to speak or swallow. The million dollars her husband received in an insurance settlement had all been spent, and he has ordered her feeding tube out. She starved to death, despite heroic efforts by legal teams to save her.

Let’s get the facts straight. The husband claimed that Terri told him she would not want to live in the state she is in. But Terri was a practicing Catholic. Catholic moral doctrine has always held that you cannot refuse ordinary care to the disabled and sick. You can refuse to take extraordinary measures, such as assisted ventilation. Food is not extraordinary care, so as long as the body can use the food, you must provide it. The logic is clear–Terri Schiavo cannot have told her husband to deny her nutrition, because that would have been a serious sin.

This case became a lightning rod for the war between the culture of life and the culture of death. I think that is a good thing. The so-called pro-life politicians are being forced to put their votes where their mouths have been. The pro-death professionals are coming out of the wall making pronouncements like “she isn’t conscious enough to suffer.” I found out from my physician daughter that nobody has ever done an MRI on Terri. How could they know what was going on inside? By allowing Terri’s husband to starve her to death, society established nutrition and hydration as extraordinary means of care. That opens the door to all kinds of murder.

Terri's soul has been committed for years into the hand of God. Since then, many other disabled persons have been condemned to that kind of death. Jesus suffered to give us an example of how to die unjustly, but He did not condone that murder. We should from time to time pray and fast in solidarity with those who are being so abused, and pray that society, in so many ways, change its mind and heart and be converted to following the Gospel.