Editor’s Note: Francis Maier gave the following address Aug. 23 at the FIRE Foundation of Denver’s annual gala. It is reprinted here with his permission.

Thanks to all of you for being here this evening. And thanks to the FIRE Foundation of Denver team for inviting Suann and me to be part of this wonderful event. I should start by noting that Suann and I have been married — happily — for nearly 54 years. And that detail is relevant tonight because Su taught for 40 of those years in New York, Los Angeles and Denver Catholic schools at the junior-high and middle-school levels. She knows the strengths and material limitations of Catholic education from firsthand experience. 

She also knows what it means to be the mother of a child with special needs. Our son Dan has Down syndrome. Three of our 11 grandchildren have disabilities ranging from the moderate to the severe. So the work of the FIRE Foundation isn’t some theoretical “good thing” for us. It’s very personal. And I hope you get a chance to speak with Suann at some point this evening because she’s an extraordinary teacher, a remarkable woman, and the heart of our family.

As it turns out, one of the reasons for the happiness in our marriage is Dan. Dan has an IQ of 43. He has trouble forming his words. He can’t easily express his thoughts. But Dan, like a lot of persons with special needs, has a particular capacity for the religious. The pipes of his spirit don’t have the everyday blockage of worries that we call normal. He knows his prayers. He’s devoted to Mother Angelica. And he prays the Rosary with her nuns three or four times a week on their YouTube videos. 

He also loves female wrestling, but that’s material for another talk. The point is, his imperfection opens a hole in the world that lets God in — not just into Dan’s life, but into ours. Dan has three grown siblings. And the one flaw they’ll never have is this: They’ll never disdain the weak. They’ll never ignore the disabled. They’ll never have contempt for the imperfect. Dan gave them that gift. The imperfect among us — people whom the world sees as somehow less than human — are the test of just how “human” the rest of us really are. And it’s the task of the Church to speak for those people. And to care for them. And to lead them to God. Which brings us to the heart of my remarks tonight. I’m here to talk about the FIRE Foundation and its importance. But I need to do that in a roundabout way. So I hope you’ll bear with me for just a few minutes.

I have a colleague, an Orthodox rabbi, whom I admire both as a scholar and a man of faith. I asked him once how the Jewish people had managed to endure despite so many centuries of persecution and exile. He answered me with one word: zakhor. It’s the Hebrew word for “remember.” Jews relentlessly remember who they are as a people, especially if they’re religious. But even if they’re not, Jews understand history as the collective memory of their community. It’s the source of their belonging to something greater than themselves. And passing that remembered identity along to the next generations is not just a priority. It’s a matter of community survival. Remembering who they are is what makes Jews such a distinct and creative minority wherever they find themselves.

I mention this because we Americans are lousy at history. As a people, we just don’t like the past. We were founded as a novus ordo seclorum, a “new order of the ages.” The past is annoying because it’s a burden. It interferes with our ability to reinvent ourselves. The good news is that this makes us pragmatic. We’re solution-oriented. This frees us to be very innovative. It accounts for our genius with tools and our technological skill. The bad news is that we don’t learn the lessons of history. And history is an unsentimental teacher. Here’s an example.

In August 1939, exactly 85 years ago this month, the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care began its work in Berlin. It took as its headquarters a villa that had been seized from a Jewish family located at Tiergartenstrasse No. 4. That address became the command center for the Third Reich’s forced euthanasia program, Action T4. The foundation and its program were disguised at first as a positive medical service for the afflicted. The reality was somewhat different. T4 had two very practical goals: to purify the gene pool by eliminating the mentally and physically defective and to save the state money otherwise wasted on a target population seen as unworthy of life. The program began with infants. But it quickly grew to include the chronically infirm and disabled. At first, patients were starved to death or injected with poison. Later, they were gassed as groups in special rooms and mobile vans for better efficiency.

At the start of T4, its directors thought that 70,000 patients would need to be terminated. And official records show that exactly that number were killed because T4 lasted just two years. The reason is simple. Many Germans were willing to see their Jewish neighbors destroyed. But they were far more uneasy with the “mercy killing” of their own handicapped children. 

As a result, public resistance forced the regime to cancel Action T4 in late 1941. But in practice, the program didn’t end. It went on until 1945 as a routine medical procedure in many German hospitals. The final toll of the forced euthanasia program was close to 300,000 murdered innocents. And of course T4 functioned as a dry run for the Holocaust. Scores of doctors and other medical personnel simply transferred from T4 to the death camps, where they continued their experiments and killings.

It would be easy to blame T4 on a gang of political thugs. It would also be wrong. The German medical and scientific professions began pushing for forced euthanasia as early as 1900. The Third Reich merely operationalized what was already the dominant view of experts. The T4 program was run and staffed, and the patients were murdered, not by SS goons but by willing doctors and nurses. And they used poisons and techniques developed by willing scientists and technicians who knew exactly what they were doing. 

All of this happened in a sophisticated nation of high culture. And maybe the most distressing fact about the whole T4 nightmare is that many of Germany’s long-term care centers for the disabled were explicitly Christian. They were affiliated with Protestant and Catholic communities. The directors of those centers knew what was happening with T4. In other words, they knew better. But nearly all of them folded under regime pressure. They surrendered their patients.

So, what does any of this have to do with our realities today?

It’s a fair question. Our son Dan has public services that were unimaginable 60 years ago. Our laws today are far more sensitive to the needs of the intellectually and physically challenged. Media portrayals of disability are much more positive than they were just a couple of decades ago. The Special Olympics movement for persons with disabilities is thriving. And “inclusion” is part of our everyday vocabulary. All of these are very good things. What happened in Germany could never happen here, because history never repeats itself. 

And yet, here’s the problem. That statement “history never repeats itself” is true. But the patterns of human thought and behavior that create history repeat themselves all the time. Ideas, including some of the very worst ones, don’t easily die. They simply take new and more appealing form, with better PR. Which is why eugenics — the idea of perfecting our gene pool by eliminating the imperfect — has never really gone away. Killing unwanted adults might be out of fashion today. But killing the unwanted in the womb, or starving them as newborns if they survive an abortion, or nudging them along to exit this mortal coil through physician-assisted suicide: These things are already in place. An expression like “reproductive rights” has the same harmless ring as Germany’s “Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care” once did. And it’s just as dishonest about the reality it disguises.

The United States is the wealthiest, most successful nation in history. Biblical faith played a key role in that success. It shaped the greatness of our national character. It inspired our reverence for human dignity. It gave us the best instincts of our social policies. But as religious belief weakens, sentiment takes its place. And under pressure, a sentiment like goodwill is no match for selfishness or utility. As Flannery O’Connor once suggested: In the absence of a serious faith, we govern by feelings like kindness. Feelings easily change. Kindness, cut off from its roots in the Person of Jesus Christ, grounds itself in mere theories about who we are as human beings and what constitutes justice. And theories, no matter how well-intentioned, have a history of legitimizing terrible things in the name of compassion or some imagined greater good. 

So why mention any of this on a beautiful summer evening? 

Here’s why: We’re all here tonight on behalf of children with special needs. Children vulnerable by nature; children sustained not by theory but by love — our love — love that involves action and sacrifice and not just feelings. We’re at a crossroads in American life — and not just because we face an especially toxic election this year. There’s a huge amount of good remaining in our country. And there’s also a growing hostility to our Christian beliefs about human dignity, sexual identity, the purpose of life, what it means to be human, and who, finally, qualifies as human — and under what conditions. 

I mentioned the Hebrew word zakhor earlier. Here’s another word: kadosh. It’s the Hebrew word for “holy,” but its literal meaning is “other than.” Holiness is the state of being “other than” the ways and values of the world. It’s why early Christians rejected abortion and infanticide, cared for the infirm, and refused to abandon their disabled children. We need to live and act in the same way. We need to remember who we are as Catholic Christians. We’re a biblical people with the task of being “other than” the world, in order to sanctify the world — starting here and now with the people and circumstances God places in our path. That’s our job. That’s why God gave us life. 

I just spent three years of my own life writing True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church. I interviewed more than a hundred people from every corner of the country and walk of life: bishops, priests, deacons, religious and laypeople. The only surprise in all that work was how strong we really are. The Church in America, despite her problems and her flaws, has more grassroots energy, more thriving apostolates, and more material strength than any other Catholic community in the world. 

We don’t hear about it because it doesn’t fit the media narrative of our day. We’re supposed to be dying, but we’re not. We’re alive. And that’s a reason for gratitude, courage and hope. The lesson we need to take from it is pretty simple. For a long time, Catholics in this country have tried very hard to be just like everybody else. And in terms of achievement, wealth and social status, we’ve succeeded. We’ve succeeded too well. Survey data show that Catholic views on disputed moral issues largely align with the general population, and our lives, as a result, have been pretty comfortable. But if we take our faith seriously, we’re not like everybody else. Our DNA as believers is different, and so is our vocation. 

We used to understand that in our bones. It’s why our Catholic schools were founded in the first place: to protect and nourish Catholic children in a hostile Protestant culture; to form our young people not just in academic excellence, but in a fruitful life of faith. If anything, the culture we see emerging around us today — a culture of appetite and distraction, noise, anxiety, unbelief and sexual confusion — is even more hostile to what we, as Catholics, hold sacred. Which means that faithful Catholic schools are even more vital today than at any time in the past. 

And if they’re vital for some of our children, they’re vital for all of them — including our children with disabilities. The body is mortal. The soul is forever. If the life of an unborn child with Down syndrome is worth saving, then that soul is also worth feeding, and guiding, and forming deeply in the love of Jesus Christ. And where better to do that than in a Catholic school, because who benefits? The child — obviously; but also his parents; his fellow students, who learn, firsthand, what it really means to be human; the donors, who have the privilege of making it possible; and the whole believing community. And that’s why the FIRE Foundation and its work are so important.

I’ll close with two quick personal stories that speak to why we’re here tonight.

Here’s the first: I have a number of good priest friends. And one of them — this is 20 or so years ago — asked me how much of my love for our son Dan was really just pity. He said it much more charitably, but that’s what he meant. And it made me angry, because it made me examine my heart, my motives and my feelings more closely than I wanted to. I think compassion for a child with disabilities is actually pretty easy. It can be a kind of emotional anesthetic that obscures the long-term, harder questions, like what happens to Dan when Su and I are gone? Will he be happy? How does he finally fit in the world? How can we help him know the love of God? Real love is more than a warm feeling. It’s the hard work of doing the right thing and the greatest good for the person you love, whatever the cost. 

Su and I are both serious about our faith, and so is our daughter Molly, who’s Dan’s closest sibling. So over the years we’ve dealt with all these issues in a way that honors Dan’s life as a blessing. But it would have been so much easier and so much more fruitful — not just for Dan, but for everyone whose life he touches — if Catholic school had been a possibility. Except it wasn’t.

Here’s the second story: Shortly after we moved to Denver in the ’90s, Suann applied to teach with the Dominicans at St. Vincent de Paul School. Her undergrad degree was in English and French, but she wanted to teach religion. And they were happy to let her do that — but only if she also taught algebra, which she had to master herself, first. She became a fantastic math teacher, which was good news for me, because she handles our finances. But the point of the story is this: When you walked into Su’s classroom, the first thing you saw was a banner, 20 feet long, across the top of the blackboard with the words, “To Jesus through Math.” To Jesus ... through math. 

What’s the purpose of a Catholic school? It’s to form the mind and to form the soul; to teach every class with excellence and fidelity to the subject matter — but always, always, through the lens of a faith that gives larger meaning to human knowledge and deeper dignity to human life. Again, why wouldn’t we want at least some of that experience, at least some of that beauty in learning, for a child with disabilities? Why wouldn’t we work and sacrifice to make that happen?

The mission of the FIRE Foundation is very simple: to champion the inclusion of students with disabilities in Catholic schools by providing educational resources, fundraising, and promoting a culture of belonging. Suann and I believe in that mission. So I ask you all to support it as generously as you can.