Coming out of Mass tonight, as we were driving away I overheard two men talking. We were driving very slowly and my window was open. One was saying, “I asked the priest why God allows mentally handicapped people to be born. Do you know what he said?” I didn’t hear what the other replied. The first went on, “He said that they are the luckiest people in the world; they don’t know the difference between right and wrong.”
It set me thinking. We had Father — for Mass and I wondered if it was he the man was talking about. I always wish when I hear things like this that I was in the situation so that I could point out what I think. What a theology of man is included in such a view!! The mind boggles. What a tragedy it would be to be born not knowing the difference between right and wrong. The essence of being human is to know right from wrong. Never to have to wrestle with good and evil, to choose between better or worse, between selfishness and love; such a person would never achieve maturity; such a person could never become a saint, never aspire to the heights.
Then I began to think a little further. Is this the ideal that the Church, or at least this priest, is presenting? Perfection is innocence – never to have known evil. Does this mean never to have known good? Are they not two sides of the same coin? To be an untouched virgin, a child in spirit. I can see why the hierarchy would want to put across this ideal. If the institutional Church were made up of such it would have few or no problems, no dissent, just meekness and obedience. Is this why the cult of the Virgin is promoted? And does it go deeper, I wondered? Is there a longing on the part of such priests for a return to the protection of childhood innocence and the insulation from responsibility that went with it? I wouldn’t be surprised. There is something very deep here which needs to be further thought out.
Then there is the, unforgivable really, mistaken idea of what it is like to be mentally handicapped. No comprehension of the agony, the unending frustration, the daily torture of being a prisoner of a wayward brain, of malfunctioning chemistry, of errant genes. It may well be that some live in a state of bliss but you only have to look at the agonised faces and afflicted bodies to know that they are not many.