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The priest in Teiá, Spain, said the child was 'an angel of God' and therefore could not sin.
Carla (pictured), a nine year Down Syndrome girl from Teià near Barcelona, has been refused first communion by the local priest.
The priest described her as ‘an angel of God’ and said that therefore she could not be a sinner and had not committed any sin since she was baptised.
Three years ago the priest told Carla’s mother that she could not take part in the confirmation classes, as ‘she had to mature’ and she could ‘disrupt the development of the class’. She finally started the classes a year later.
The case has generated widespread coverage in Spain and the priest concerned has now claimed that he later changed his mind and told the mother he had done so, but she had ignored his invitation. The mother says that despite her efforts to integrate Carla into society, events such as this make her discriminated against and marginalised.
Meanwhile other arrangements have been made and Carla will now have her first communion on June 14 in another church in Badalona.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From TypicallySpanish.com:
