“Like the Good Samaritan, there is a need to empower the community.” Sister Veronica Donatello, head of the CEI national service for the pastoral care of disabled people, said this at the online meeting promoted yesterday by Caritas of Florence entitled "The person with disabilities in the Christian community. Opportunity or temptation?”.

In Italy, an estimate from the Catholic University speaks of 7 million people with disabilities. “If you also count the elderly,” Sister Donatello specified. “I believe – he added – many architectural barriers have been removed. But the cultural ones still exist and I think this makes the other invisible. As a Church we have a long way to go, we are still lacking in recognizing the disabled person as belonging. Even in the Church there are often pietistic, non-Christian postures." One of the risks is looking for the “norm”: “I prefer that we are all people. Sometimes – he added – politically correct terms risk ghettoising. It's useless to put the slide if you keep the category 'deaf' or 'foreigner' in your head." The Church, for Sister Donatello, is called to reclaim the entire life span of people with disabilities. “I often say that they act as a check up on the generativity of the Church, even if they do not yet hold roles. We should recover the meaning of the Gospel." Finally, Sister Donatello offers some suggestions to parishes that want to reach out to people with disabilities: "Go out, get to know them, invite them, value them and accompany them throughout their lives".