The shadows in front

Since my amputation, the surprisingly arrogant, haughty or derogatory aspects of direct personal experiences with how people deal with me, as person with a visible physical disability, haven’t stopped.

Hiding my presence from their cultural artifacts, surely a good way of presenting themselves as particularly capable ; ) That is not new. It is a practice whose path the Catholic Church already had paved.

The Catholic Church has a long, structurally embedded history of concealing disability among clergy, pathologizing bodily difference, and institutionally excluding amputees and other visibly disabled people from priesthood and leadership. Not by accident, but because of how it tied holiness to bodily integrity, authority to appearance, and sacramental power to male physical normativity. From late antiquity onward, the Church absorbed Greco-Roman ideas that equated physical wholeness with moral order. A perfect male body was treated as a sign of rationality, authority, and divine favor. Disability, especially visible impairment or limb loss, was read as lack, defect, or punishment. This wasn’t always stated bluntly, but it shaped canon law, liturgy, and clerical culture. The priest was imagined as an alter Christus—and Christ was imagined as intact, controlled, unblemished. That fiction mattered. Medieval and early modern canon law treated many disabilities as irregularities (irregularitates)—legal impediments to ordination or exercise of orders. Amputation, paralysis, blindness, deafness, epilepsy, and disfigurement were routinely cited. The logic was not pastoral; it was functional and symbolic. A priest had to perform precise manual acts at the altar, speak clearly, stand visibly as a representative of order. An amputee body disrupted that visual theology. Even when dispensations were theoretically possible, they were rare and discretionary, reinforcing the idea that disabled clergy were exceptions, not legitimate norms. When disability occurred after ordination, the Church often responded by hiding it. Priests who lost limbs through war, illness, or accident were quietly reassigned, removed from public sacramental roles, or placed in administrative or cloistered settings. Assistive devices were discouraged if visible. Prostheses were expected to mimic normality, not assert difference. The goal was not inclusion but erasure—maintain the illusion of the intact priesthood. This mirrors how the Church handled mental illness, aging, and later sexual abuse: move the problem out of sight, preserve the façade. Amputation exposes the lie at the heart of clerical embodiment. It has the subversive capacity to show that authority does not depend on bodily completeness. For an institution that sacralized male bodies as vessels of divine power, that was intolerable. An amputee priest forces uncomfortable questions: If grace flows through a missing hand, why did the hand matter? If Christ’s wounds remain in resurrection, why is the Church afraid of visible loss? Rather than face those questions, the institution defaulted to exclusion. Modern Catholic rhetoric emphasizes human dignity and pastoral inclusion, but structural discrimination remains. Seminaries still screen aggressively for physical disability. Bishops quietly discourage visibly disabled candidates, citing pastoral optics, burden on the faithful, or practical limitations. Amputees may be told they are welcome as lay ministers but unsuitable for priesthood. The language softened; the outcome did not change much. Disability also undermines clerical exceptionalism. The Church’s power system depends on priests appearing set apart, elevated, and stable. Disabled bodies signal vulnerability, dependence, and contingency—the very things the hierarchy fears. So disability is spiritualized when convenient (redemptive suffering) and excluded when inconvenient (ordination, authority, visibility). That is not theology; it is institutional self-protection. The Church did not merely fail disabled people. It actively curated an able-bodied priesthood to maintain symbolic control. Amputees were not rejected because they couldn’t serve; they were rejected because they revealed the arbitrariness of sacramental power. A priest without a limb threatens the myth that holiness looks a certain way.

So what is it that people are letting me know?.

Telling me directly just how horrible they think one should view people with disabilities.

That I would be better off killing myself (yep – a person of rank and name).

That people with disabilities are textbook examples of people permanently lacking executive function (prominent course in ethics and research).

That they expect me to be always submissive and passively friendly (a person of particular rank and name, explained also they’d be terribly disappointed if I would not comply).

That federal work law doesn’t apply to me (peoples of ranks and names).

That I will never, ever, ever, get that type of promotion (a person of quite high rank and name, which another person of very high rank and name had told me).

That federal court decisions I brought up for consideration were not to be believed in (several decisions saying the same; a person of rank and name).

That there exists a particularly bad hell hole on earth, and that would be, where the disabled people line up to get handed out their prosthetic limbs and wheel chairs (definitely a person of high rank and name, in front of a whole audience including me, until I interrupted that when others of high rank and name that were there did not).

That they cannot at all bear the fact that I swim faster than them (a non disabled lawyer).

That I was personally expected to do things to them they would never ever be able to deliver themselves because these things were so nasty (another person).

The list is longer, there are many anecdotes, too. They never stop. They are ongoing.

An everyday experience. The whole thing does not lack advanced level entertainment.

The shadows behind that

See post about Cloerkes [link].

My guess is we will never see the end to that, because one does face a type of general derision and discrimination that has the order of magnitude of a natural force.

But just like a thunderstorm or earth quake, this type of sheer hate cannot be stopped.

On another note, I did get me a Potger Pietri Earth Quake edition, via eBay (not ever an Apple Watch — yes, you: I still see you, stared at my wrist like you saw a ghost).

It has to be stated as a great plus, that these people share their deepest insecurities and anxieties, such as in this context. We have to acknowledge their trust and courage, to open up in this day and age. Getting anyone to let go of such deeply ingrained attitudes is impossible, all one may achieve is that they push their view and attitude from level of basis narrative to sub-basis narrative, and that is certainly not a healthy way to go about social differences at all, to push their issues and their unresolved hate just one closet deeper.

So better we openly address this as that elephant in the room, and then simply hide from each other. To not talk, to not spend time, to preferably not see, to definitely not privately, to perform lived segregation. That so far seemed to work. I also do my part, in keeping the corridors clean, so to say.