In May of 2008, a Catholic parish refused to let a 13-year-old autistic boy attend mass because of his “disruptive” behavior and filed a restraining order against the family to keep them away. The story made national headlines, and because the story hit so close to come for me, I decided to write Rev. Daniel Walz, who ultimately made the decision, a personal letter. He never responded.

June 6th, 2008

Rev. Daniel Walz, Pastor
St. Joseph Parish
PO Box 158
Bertha, MN 56437

Dear Reverend Walz,

It seems you’ve taken quite a bit of heat over the past few weeks because of a certain family and their autistic son. I’d image that when you envisioned yourself as a priest when you were a young man, you pictured yourself the hero of your community; a Christ-like preacher touching everyone around you with divinely-inspired words of infinite wisdom, giving hope to the hopeless and guiding the spiritually helpless out of the darkness of the world’s sinful ways. The problem with dreams is that they are just that – dreams. There are real-world difficulties that stand in the way of any profession. Sometimes it’s finding a way to pay for school, or having to move from the place you’ve called home all your life to get that job you really want. Sometimes you find that perfect job, but your boss is just intolerable, or your successful band’s singer suddenly quits a week before your first world tour begins.

The main difficulty in yours, I presume, is finding a way to stay relevant in an ever-changing world: to make an archaic institution mean something to people who have discovered that science and naturalism offer far more answers than an indifferent invisible man in the sky. And for those not quite ready to let go of the fairy tales that have been drummed into their heads since birth, I’d imagine it’s not easy to keep them coming back to those hard wooden pews every Sunday when all you have to offer is mind-numbing chants and stale bread. After all, they didn’t have cable and satellite to compete with a few hundred years ago.

But I guess these are larger problems your organization as a whole has to deal with; you just work there, after all. Your job is simply to keep the momentum going: to keep the status quo in effect and unquestioned by those who fill the collection plate. I doubt that if your patrons were able to be honest in such a setting, they would confess to feeling fulfilled by the Holy Spirit after every mass. Instead, I think they would feel more obligated to attend than anything else. There’s that ugly head of tradition again, continually forcing people to go through motions that have long since lost their meaning in the light of the Information Age.

I’m guessing that “tradition” thing is what caused this whole hiccup in your career in the first place. The old church says to “cast this boy’s demons out,” and when that doesn’t work, simply lock him up in an asylum where no one has to witness God’s little mistakes. The new church says…well…basically the same thing, except they’re much more polite about it. First, you acknowledge the problem, like your diocese did in 2005 by awarding Carol Race for “her efforts to encourage families with disabled children to attend mass.” You reward her “untiring efforts…to educate and advocate for others who have children with disruptive disabilities such as autism and seek to participate as a total family at Sunday mass” by calling autism a “disruptive disability,” which is much like calling a boy in a wheelchair a “protruding obstruction” in the aisle between pews; but, considering your ignorance here, at least you tried. My research into the matter did not uncover what type of award it was, if it was a plaque or a framed certificate or a blurb in the church bulletin; but whatever it happened to be, I’m sure it made you look good. It made it appear as if you were doing something to positively affect the community, much like “casting the demons out” did in the past. You know damn well it doesn’t change a thing, but it keeps parishioners giving money to an organization they assume to be doing some good.

Then it became clear after a few years that an award simply doesn’t cure autism, nor does it make it conveniently shut its mouth during listlessly recited prayers. So, much like your predecessors, you suggested, albeit much more courteously, that Adam (an ironically symbolic name at that) be “put away” where no one had to face his struggle right along with him. Maybe to avoid pressing that “hot button,” you didn’t suggest that Ms. Race institutionalize him, but you did suggest some “separate but equal” alternatives that sound a lot like…well, I think you know where I’m going with that one.

Carol had to be difficult, though. She had to keep insisting that the book you told her to read clearly states that Jesus was a friend to the outcasts and a lover of children (not in the same way the priesthood is today, of course); that if one were to ask, “What would Jesus do?” he would certainly not tell anyone to witness the Sermon on the Mound from a video feed, but from at his very feet instead. What you neglected to teach her, as I’m sure you have learned recently, is that the Bible hasn’t exactly aged well over the last few millennia. It doesn’t quite satisfy our curiosities nearly as well as research and proven facts. “God works in mysterious ways,” doesn’t quite explain Adam’s outbursts or lack of understanding of his religious “duties.”

You might have thought up until this point that I am completely on Ms. Race’s side of this issue, that I have not put myself in your shoes. I have, though, and I cannot say that I am in full support of her headstrong mentality, either. As she has stated to the press, she firmly believes that if her and her family were to not attend mass every single Sunday, they would all burn in the blackest pits of hell because it is a grave sin (breaking a commandment, even) to miss this obligation. For a middle class single mother of five children, who has probably seen and been through it all, to actually believe that if her family does not enter a fancy building once a week, their souls will be tortured by a guy with horns and a pitchfork until the end of time is proof of just how little she truly understands about the real world. For her to also state that, “The church isn’t bad. But it’s what some individuals do within the church,” shows typical apologist rhetoric and her ignorance towards the history of the Catholic Church and Christianity in general. I never understood defending something that’s clearly against you. It’s like a black man joining the KKK: they will never accept you, and their principles clearly alienate you, so why support them?

But then again, that is to be expected from a churchgoer, right? After all, you made her this way. You have instilled in her these beliefs since baptism, and now you want to ban her from your church because she’s mindlessly following them, considering no alternative, just as you taught her. You and your Church created this monster, Reverend, and now you must “reap what you sow,” as you preachers love to say.

I guess I should explain why I am writing such a bitter and caustic letter to you. This isn’t just some topic-of-the-week for me, and my response is far from the knee-jerk reactions that I’m sure you are used to by this point. This issue happens to touch upon two subjects near and dear to my heathen heart – religion and autism. They are actually pretty closely intertwined for me. I was raised Catholic, as I’m sure you may have guessed, and I went to a Catholic school from pre-school until eighth grade, but I was never truly a believer. This is not to say that I didn’t “get it.” I was actually a straight-A student. It’s just that I could not find one example of Christ’s love amongst the entire experience; not one child, teacher, nun, or priest seemed to truly follow the examples set before us. I was picked on relentlessly by my fellow students for no good reason whatsoever…maybe I was an easy target because I was a quiet nerd, I’m not sure. I wondered how the same kids who were so good at memorizing Bible passages could not even gain one ounce of significance from them. Teachers looked on and let it happen, and some even joined in, especially if they happened to be nuns. I’d ask a priest a question concerning our religion, and then I’d ask another the same question, only to find completely different answers each time.

But what really made me question the Church and all that I had been fed was the day I saw my mother visibly upset in the hallway. She had just come from a meeting with the principal about enrolling my autistic brother, and they had rejected him because his disability was just “too much to handle.” She tried explaining it to me, but I just could not comprehend why they wouldn’t want my brother there. He was the greatest kid I had ever known in my young life, and here I was being taught to discriminate against him because of a problem he couldn’t help and they didn’t care to understand. It was at that moment that I knew there was more out there.

When I graduated, I chose a public high school and began reading everything I could concerning religion, philosophy, and politics, and soon I realized how well atheistic views coincided with my own. It was not just a cynical backlash towards the hypocrisy I had grown up with: it was what I had felt all along. I wondered as I kneeled in those pews why I had no words for God, why I felt so asinine and uncomfortable mumbling prayers to myself. I thought that all the contradictions and absurdities I had found during Bible study were just my daydreaming. But here were volumes of books, written by the most intellectual men and women in the world, describing what I felt, seeing what I saw, and backing it all up with solid facts and arguments, not half-witted excuses concocted by historically corrupt organizations with ulterior motives. My brother, with his handicap, had taught me more than all those “good Christian folk” ever could. You may want to take a few lessons from Adam yourself.

You claim to be some holy authority with the term “Reverend,” or do you prefer “Father,” Mr. Walz? You’re deserving of neither title, as “Reverend” implies that I should revere you in some way, or stand in awe of your mighty presence. I cannot revere nor stand in awe of someone who claims to represent an all-loving deity who creates children with mental deficiencies and then sweeps them under the rug so his other creations do not have to stand in horror of their presence. And “Father” entails a sense of responsibility you’re clearly not ready for. A father is someone who prepares his children for the harsh world out there, who provides for them and nourishes them until they are ready to fend for themselves. Instead, you preach to your congregation lies about healing the sick and feeding the poor, as if sitting in a building or buying potato pancakes at the church picnic is solving either problem.

You ask them to give and sacrifice and volunteer as the Pope returns to Rome in a private jet, to relax in one of the most lavish palaces in the world in garb worth more than my entire family’s assets. And you think you should be praised for giving your whole life to an organization that is responsible for more death, destruction, and misery than any plague or natural disaster your God could muster. You think I should respect someone who did not even research his own beliefs before committing himself to them, who ignores that his faith stole everything from pagan religions millennia ago and whose savior was just concocted from an archetype that existed long before his supposed virgin birth. I should revere someone who reads from a book daily yet never stopped to think about how flawed, edited, and mistranslated those pages really are? Even if you wish to take the entire thing symbolically, and considering there’s a story in there about a guy putting a pair of every living thing on a boat, I certainly hope you do, you and your Church rarely live by the impossible standards you’ve set for us all. If you were offended by my earlier priest-rape joke, consider being more offended by the scandal itself and the fact that the organization you’re proud to associate yourself with covered it up as best they could and paid for the legal defenses of said offenders. It seems that if you spent at least half of your efforts sheltering the homeless and feeding the hungry, then you just wouldn’t have the time to put together petitions and file restraining orders; you’d be too busy setting an example worth following.

Your spokeswoman, Jane Marrin, told the press, “It’s a difficult issue. There are no easy answers.” But really, there are. You just will not admit them to the press or to yourself. The mass has been altered consistently over the years. Just within the last few decades, you stopped preaching in Latin and started letting blacks worship in integrated churches, amongst other changes. Your ceremonies should be accommodating Adam, not the other way around. This isn’t a matter of keeping parishioners safe; it’s a matter of keeping them sheltered.

1 in every 150 children in the United States is diagnosed with autism or a similar disorder. What is your Church going to do as more of these children show up for mass? The puzzle that is autism simply cannot be answered by centuries of Christian theology. There is no compassionately logical reason why God would make Adam the way he is, unless you wanted to interpret this as your “test of faith.” If so, it is obvious that you and your diocese have failed quite miserably, and still more potential followers (or in your eyes, potential cash) will turn away as a result.

I’m sure you’ve questioned many times why your religion is slowly losing its grip on society, and the answer is simple – you’re forcing everyone to turn away. You should be thankful that people like Carol are still willing to believe in a religion that creates world wars, protects criminals, and aids in the election of greedy lunatics. It takes a hell of a lot of blind faith to think that way, and it would be such a pity on your part to waste all your brainwashing efforts. Just let it be known that the rest of us are not fooled by your “Minnesota nice.” You and your congregation can pretend to care about Adam’s “best interests” all you want, but the ugly truth is that you just want him out of your sight so his problems (and the problems of the rest of the world) can be out of your mind. The Catholic Church is very good at ignoring the world’s suffering while managing to profit from it. This case is symbolic of the whole thing, really, and you’re just doing your job. Keep playing your part, Reverend – you have a legacy to uphold.

Sincerely,
Rich Howells,
Catholic by birth
Atheist by choice

And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.
Mark 10:13-16