Few would doubt that problems of disability come within the Church's Pro-Life Ministry. Some may question, however, whether those problems also raise questions of social justice. As I hope to show, certain difficulties we disabled people face indeed go to the very heart of Catholic social thought.
Rather than separate and independent, "Pro-Life" and "Social Justice" are convertible terms. They reference the same reality, the good of the human person, differing only in their perspective: the former addresses human life itself as a good; the latter focuses on the good of its development. Issues of disability, however, should be the concern of both.
Today's threats to life — abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide — are largely aimed against disabled people. A fetal abnormality is routinely considered a death warrant, not a diagnosis. Withholding life-support from certain disabled newborns has become an open secret. Disabled adults are told that, by electing suicide with the caring help of others, they assert their autonomy by choosing to make themselves dead. In the face of these threats, how can we take seriously the claim of American law that the presence of a disability does not lessen human worth?
Beyond direct threats to life, social justice teaching considers the ways social organizations foster or impede human development. In its focus on societal structures, social justice, of course, presupposes that the subjects of its concern are in fact members of society. For much of the last century, however, disabled people were banished from public life; hidden in back rooms, excluded from common schools, stored in institutions, and often neutered there, as the Supreme Court once explained, "to prevent our being swamped with incompetence." Their treatment, Thurgood Marshall astutely observed, "in its virulence and bigotry, rivaled, and indeed paralleled, the worst excesses of Jim Crow."
Once mainstreaming began, however, disabled people found themselves the poorest, least educated, and largest minority in America. That fact alone should make disabled people a concern of social justice, with its preferential option for the poor; but certain problems disabled people face indeed go to the very heart of Catholic social thought, because they raise questions of human work.
Early in his pontificate, John Paul II addressed this point in Laborem Exercens, observing initially that "human work is a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question". Made in God's image, we share in His divine activity, the work of creation. By understanding human work, we understand humanity: We come to know what is due to each of us as human persons, which is at the heart of the question of social justice.
Human work, the Pope explained, has both an objective and subjective value. Commanded to subdue the earth, we are all called to master, transform and construct, according to the Divine Builder's plan and our unique creativity, appropriating the resources around us for our benefit and that of others.
Work, however, not only makes good things for man, but also "is a good thing for man", the subject of work. "Through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes 'more a human being.'"
Yet, it is work "for man" and not man "for work" — that is, the objective dimensions of work, subduing the earth and its resources, no matter their importance, are never superior to humans, the subject of work. Accordingly, "the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done, but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person."
Disabled people are fully human persons with corresponding inalienable rights. As a consequence, "they should be helped to participate in the life of society in all its aspects and at all the levels accessible to their capacities." John Paul II further warned that, "to admit to the life of the community, and thus admit to work, only those who are fully functional" would constitute "a serious form of discrimination" by permitting the objective aspect of work to dominate its subjective value.
Nevertheless, after over thirty years of nondiscrimination laws, estimates are that a quarter of all working-age disabled Americans still live below the poverty line; less than 40% of all such people are gainfully employed; and only around 23% are employed full-time/full-year. Though the problem is indeed staggering, the Pontiff insisted that its solution "must not be shirked", for offering disabled people work, proportionate to their abilities, "is demanded by their dignity as persons and as subjects of work."
Simply put, as the U.S. Bishops explained in their 1978 pastoral statement, disabled people "have the same duty as all members of the community to do the Lord's work in the world, according to their God-given talents and capacity." Until society grasps the fact that disabled people are also called by God to work, it will never fully accept that work, commensurate with their capabilities, is their human right. When disabled people are enabled to work and, thus, to express more fully their common humanity, they help bring into a clearer focus the image of God on earth. That, after all, is the goal of Catholic social thought.
