There is a deep question hardwired into human persons. The nature of our created identity begs us to ask it. The psalmist phrased it this way: “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:4). It was stated more as an admonition in two simple but ponderously difficult words at the entrance to the temple at Delphi: “Know Thyself.” If we do that, if we take up the challenge of growing in self-knowledge, we find uncomfortably that we are a mystery to ourselves. We find that those around us are even more so, and then we encounter what it really means to love.
In the first encyclical of his papacy, Saint John Paul II provided the key to understanding ourselves. Quoting Gaudium et Spes 22, the dogmatic constitution on the Church written during the Second Vatican Council, he wrote in Redemptor Hominis that “the truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (8).
To many, human persons who have cognitive impairments are a particularly puzzling mystery. If God created man in his image with the capacity for reason, then who—or what—are these people whose minds are simple and whose understanding is slow? Some might judge them to be less than human; evidence confirms that in the past, many individuals were abused, experimented on, and housed in institutions where they were treated like animals.
Attempts to understand and label intellectual disability in a medical or scientific way didn’t begin until the nineteenth century, but disabilities are nothing new. In 2024, there was an article in Nature Communications that presented the first documented cases of Down syndrome. Researchers had analyzed fossil remains from 5,000 years ago and genetic testing confirmed an extra twenty-first chromosome. For perspective, 5,000 years ago cities were beginning to form and the Sumerians were first developing cuneiform, the first written language. Amazing as this is, there is even earlier evidence of disability in Neanderthal populations from as many as 270,000 years ago: A child was discovered who possibly had Down syndrome, and the structure of the skull indicates he would have needed substantial care for his six years of life—care the evidence suggests he probably received from his family and community.
What do you think families would have thought when a “different” kind of child with demanding needs was born? There were no doctors, at least as we know them today. There was no access to a diagnosis, no labels, no scientific or medical knowledge as we have now, which allows us to understand the cause of disability and provide specialized care. Of course, we can’t really know much and have to make many assumptions of life in those times, but at least in this case the fossil record suggests a child with possible disabilities was cared for and loved within the family.
Assigning labels can cause discrimination and fragmentation of humanity when we begin to only see people through the labels we assign to them.
Dr. John Langdon Down was one of the first medical doctors to try to understand intellectual disability. Working in the mid-nineteenth century in an institution that cared for individuals with intellectual disabilities, he was the first to describe the common features of what we now call Down syndrome and put them into a category he called the “Mongolian type of idiot.” Before condemning Down’s language, it’s important to understand he was using the latest knowledge of his day, influenced by the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Blumenbach was trying to understand why humans appeared in different “varieties” and decided that all human persons must have degenerated from an original type into five varieties he identified by their ethnic types. Dr. Down took up this theory and concluded that children with the common features he saw in his patients must have been the result of a racial “retrogression” or a “degeneracy” that occurred in their family. Because of their physical characteristics, he associated them with the “Mongolian racial variety.” With our current knowledge, this kind of “science” seems primitive and its language offensive to our modern ears. It is, but keep in mind that Dr. Down was working out of the knowledge of his day and was sincere in his desire to understand and help his patients, whom he reportedly cared for and treated with dignity and respect.
Blumenbach and Down’s work reflects what is still at the heart of scientific understanding: categorization. We categorize different diseases based on their symptoms, or increasingly their genetic profiles; we categorize flora and fauna so that we can monitor ecological threats or evolutionary developments, make assumptions of the past and present, and make projections of what the future of life on earth might be like.
But what happens when we place human persons into defined categories? When we sort people according to race, ethnicity, sex, interests, beliefs, and, of course, disability? For some, sorting people into categories has political value or helps us study people in the context of their culture. Assigning labels can cause discrimination and fragmentation of humanity when we begin to only see people through the labels we assign to them.
Categorizing persons by disability has had mixed consequences over the last hundred years. On the positive side, it has inspired research to improve medical conditions that can coexist with developmental disabilities, such as Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, which can be profoundly life limiting. Perhaps medical research will someday find solutions to the conditions that are most serious.
Focusing on fragments of one’s identity causes us to overlook what it is that makes the person truly human—their soul.
But what happens when doctors want to fix things and can’t? From the abortion statistics following a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, we know the answer. In the early twentieth century, some physicians helped fuel a eugenic movement that continues to have devastating consequences today. Early eugenic efforts attempted to control who could reproduce—even by forced sterilizations of the disabled. We’ve moved on now to the use of prenatal diagnosis to identify and abort so-called defective fetuses. So, using a person’s disability as their identity has consequences.
Attempts to categorize or to conceptualize disability through various models has its beginning in the nineteenth century with Dr. John Langdon Down and others. The medical and social models are two of the most familiar, but they fail to reflect the whole person, instead fragmenting their identity into “features” of the person. The medical model sees the person with a disability as one who needs to be fixed, and the social model sees the person as marginalized, or even oppressed and excluded from society. Both of those have some merit, but focusing on fragments of one’s identity causes us to overlook what it is that makes the person truly human—their soul.
So, this is where we pivot back to Saint John Paul II and his comment that “the truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.” Disability is a part of the mystery of God’s creation of the human person, and to understand disability, we must view it through the mystery of the incarnate Word.
In the third part of the Summa theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas addresses the question whether the Son of God ought to have assumed human nature with defects of body. His response is this:
The infirmity assumed by Christ did not impede, but greatly furthered the end of the Incarnation. . . . Although these infirmities concealed His Godhead, they made known His Manhood, which is the way of coming to the Godhead according to Rom. 5:1, 2: “By Jesus Christ we have access to God.”
Nancy Eiesland in her book The Disabled God explores disability from a disability rights perspective; she has some excellent comments on what we can learn about disability by contemplating the wounded Christ. She reflects on Jesus as he appears to his disciples with his wounds following the Resurrection:
In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God. Jesus, the resurrected Savior, calls for his frightened companions to recognize in the marks of impairment their own connection with God, their own salvation. In so doing, this disabled God is also the revealer of a new humanity. The disabled God is not only the One from heaven but the revelation of true personhood, underscoring the reality that full personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability.
Perhaps Doubting Thomas preferred the medical model. He needed empirical proof before he would believe the bodily Resurrection of Jesus, whom he saw before him. His probing into Christ’s wounds quickly converted him to that reality, and he proclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”
So, what can we understand from the vulnerability of Christ in his Incarnation? In Eiesland’s words, “It underscored the reality that full personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability.” According to Aquinas, the wounds of Christ were necessary proof of his humanity and Saint Thomas the apostle confirmed that. We know that it is through those wounds of Jesus’s humanity that we have access to God. The writer of Hebrews put it this way: “He had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect. . . . Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested” (Heb. 2:17–18).
To witness the vulnerability of Christ in his Incarnation confirms for us that we have a compassionate savior, and viewing our Lord’s vulnerability should also reveal to us the dignity of the person living with a disability.
How did Jesus reveal his compassion? By his identification with the suffering poor. He proclaimed the kingdom to the marginalized, and he healed and advocated for the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, and the disabled. He reached out to the outcasts, was born into poverty, labored with his foster father, and submitted to authority. He asked us to identify with the vulnerable too. Remember his words recorded in the Gospel of Matthew: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40). He asks that the witness of his compassion become the witness of our love.
So, to end with a short examen. When we see someone with a disability, what are our interior thoughts? What do we say to them or to others about them? Do we see a diagnosis that needs to be fixed or an annoyance at Mass we wish would just sit still and be quiet? Or do we see, with the eyes of Christ, not fragments of a human person that cause us to identify them with their disability but someone just like us in all the essential ways. Someone like each of us who has our own vulnerabilities—a person with their own perhaps more visible vulnerabilities?
Categories have their value, but they have their liabilities too. We are all challenged to accept those with disabilities into the family of the Church and into our homes and communities just as they are. In other words, to treat all persons like followers of Christ who are called to integrate ourselves into his identity.
“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” Look to the cross and the vulnerability of Christ. The answer is there in the mystery of the incarnate Word.