Read an edited transcript of Jean Vanier's recent remarks at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago:

I've been living for 42 years with people with disabilities, and in so many ways they have transformed me. My life is to live with them, and that is an immense privilege -- to be with those who are fragile, vulnerable and weak. But also I feel it's important to share a bit, because I believe they have an incredible message.

When I'm going to be talking about people with disabilities, I'm talking about all those who are broken and wounded and lonely, because it's really important to listen to them. I'm not sure that we can really understand the message of Jesus if we haven't listened to the weak. Jesus came to announce good news to the poor and to the oppressed, so we have to listen to them. What is good news? What is good news for people who are poor and weak and rejected?

I'm talking now in the year 2006, when many people with disabilities are being killed before their birth and at their birth. We can talk about the importance of no abortion, but we have to talk about who these people are in the plan of God. And you know that the Gospel talks a lot about people with disabilities, to such an extent that Paul, when he compares the body of Christ to the church, our body, the human body, he says those parts of the body which are the weakest and which are the least presentable are necessary to the body of the church and should be honored. I haven't yet seen an ecclesiology that begins with saying that people with disabilities are necessary to the church. And why?

We have become a very dangerous world. I was very caught up in the war, 1939 to 1945, when our family was amongst the refugees as Hitler's armies broke into France. We escaped in June. I joined, when I was 13, the Royal Navy. I had an experience of the military. Shortly after the liberation of Paris, I was, with my mother who was in the Canadian Red Cross, welcoming people who were arriving from Dachau, Belsen, Ravensbrook, Buchenwald and other concentration camps, and to see these men and women arriving in their blue and white striped uniforms -- but genocides have continued in the Balkans, in Rwanda [and] other places of Africa.

Where is Jesus through all that, and what is Jesus asking of his disciples, of you and me? I want to say a few words to begin with about our world and that growing gap between the powerful and the powerless, which is all about Lazarus and the Gospel message of Lazarus, that beggar with leprosy who was just sitting at the door of the rich man. He would have liked to have eaten some of the crumbs that fell from the table of the rich man, but the dogs got there first.

Lazarus died and went to Abraham, and the rich man died and went to the place of torment. And the rich man looked up and saw [Lazarus] at the side of Abraham [and] he said, "Send Lazarus down to put some water on my lips." And Father Abraham said, "No, there is a gap which cannot be crossed over." He could have added there was a gap during your life; you didn't see him, and you didn't want to see him. You see, the Lazaruses of this world disturb us, because we don't know what to do. They reveal to us our poverty. We don't know what to do; we feel impoverished in front of them, and there is no easy answer. We feel broken in front of them and pretend or hope not to see them. The poor always disturb us.

Do you know the psalm, "The Lord hears the cry of the poor"? But we don't want to hear the cry of the poor. So our world is a world where the divisions are immense. We're in a culture where success, power and all the rest are encouraged, and we don't know quite how to get out of all that. Right at the [beginning of our] education we have to become winners. [There are] a few winners, many losers and many victims, and we don't quite know what to do. Because on one side there is a culture which is part of our identity, and yet there are things that are going wrong and we don't know what to do, because it's in the school system, it's everywhere.

A young Korean woman in one of our communities said to me, "When I was young, adolescent, I was scared stiff of relationship," she said, "because my parents were always fighting, so I saw that relationship was dangerous. So I decided to be a success." And she was. She was a great success in studies and then a success in work. [She] went up the ladder, and at the age of 30 she said, "I felt a certain dis-ease within me. I had protected myself from all forms of relationship. I didn't want to be vulnerable. So I had closed up, and I was wearing a mask, and I felt at dis-ease." And then by one of those realities of providence, she fell into L'Arche and discovered relationships.

We're in a culture which favors success and doesn't favor relationships, and particularly relationships with the different, whatever that different could be. It could be the different is with people with disabilities who are in institutions or sometimes in the streets. It's the creation of walls. You see, there are frontiers around our countries; we must protect ourselves and have security. So [too] the walls of our hearts, where we want to protect ourselves. All of us -- we have defense mechanisms, systems of defense.

And thank God we do. When you're in some sort of situation and you know it's dangerous, it's better to "buzz off," so it's good. But at the same time, we can close up behind walls and refuse to see who is on the other side and therefore refuse to discover our common humanity. We can have nice theories, but the reality is that we're frightened. We're frightened of the different. We're frightened of the strange. We're frightened of the stranger. And why? Because we don't quite know what to do with most people with disabilities, and all of you have experienced it, and I have experienced it -- an anxiety. We don't know how to communicate well. It's much easier to run away or pretend they don't exist or pretend that they don't understand. It's easier.

There are very deep fears within all of us, so one of the things that is important is that we become conscious of where our fears are and what are we frightened of, and discovering that we're frightened of showing our vulnerability, so we build up walls, walls around our hearts, walls around our groups.

Friendship is one of the most beautiful of human realities. Aristotle says that life wouldn't be living without friends. Cicero says that if you don't have friends it's like being on earth and there's no sun. Friendship is important, but friendship can be dangerous. We close ourselves up, we flatter each other: "You're super." "No, you're super." "We are super." And so we deprive ourselves of one of the great riches, which is to discover that difference is a richness and not a threat. But we can close ourselves off in closed communities in the knowledge that we are right and the others aren't right, that we are an elite and the others are no good.

Let's reflect about walls. There's a French economist who says, how is it that [in] 2006, with the incredible technology we have, there [are] still millions and millions of people who don't have good water, food, medical attention and education? How is it, because we've got such power in our hands, such immense capacity? I'm not going to just say that we're putting all the money in armaments and so on; it is that also. But what is it behind that? He says that one of the problems we human beings [have] is that we are conscious of death, which is quite different [from] cows and birds. When you see cows you don't see any of them have anguish. We human beings are people of anguish [for] a lot of reasons. But one of them is that we are not masters of our lives. Tomorrow can be cancer or tomorrow can be an accident. We are not masters of our lives.

Because of consciousness of death we have to make our mark on humanity. We have to do things which prove that we are great and wonderful and admirable. We have to continually be fighting this fear of disappearing and nobody knowing or remembering me. We have to "do." So we're in a world because of death and because we haven't integrated death. We're all pretending death doesn't exist. And when I use [the word] "death" I'm not just using the physical reality of death, but all the forms of death, which are exclusion, being pushed aside, being told that you're no good, [of] no value, you're mentally sick, you're caught in a world of drugs, alcohol and all the rest.

I have been very moved by Etty Hillesum, the Dutch Jewish girl who was assassinated in Auschwitz in November 1943. When she was in the camp at Westerberg, there were some 10,000 Jews waiting to be carted off to the camp of Auschwitz. At one of the moments she says this, and I find it very moving: The reality of death has become a definite part of my life. My life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by looking death in the eye and accepting it. It sounds paradoxical. By excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life. By admitting death we enlarge our life and enrich it. [It is] amazing that she wrote not too long before she was carted off to Auschwitz.

Because she knew that she was going to die and that she was before death, she lived incredibly full life. In that camp she was a source of life and of hope for all the people that were there, because somehow within her she was living, fully living.

[Rabindranath] Tagore says death is not the lamp that is extinguished; it is the coming of dawn. In the book of Genesis in the third [chapter], man and woman were created by God -- I would say held in the hand of God. And then at a particular moment, there was tension or temptation or call it whatever you want. But somewhere they felt inside of themselves a struggle to want to decide for themselves and not have somebody else decide for them. They want to decide what is good and what is not good for them, their family and for humanity.

So they broke off from God to do their thing. It's the story of humanity. And God is incredibly humbled. But then afterwards he runs after Adam: "Adam, where are you?" And Adam says, "I was frightened because I was naked, and so I hid." Fear, nakedness, hiding. What is this nakedness of which he's scared stiff? His incapacity to control. Losing control. He thought he was going to make all the decisions, and now he finds that nakedness of death, nakedness of rejection. So he's frightened and so he hides.

What he is hiding is his vulnerability. That's what we're all hiding -- our vulnerability. We want to prove something - that we are okay. Somewhere at the very heart of our humanity there is the need to be admired and the immense fear of being humiliated, of being pushed out. One of my friends was chaplain in a prison of Cleveland. An inmate went up to see him and said, "You like saying Mass?" "Yeah." "Do you say Mass well?" "Yeah." "You like preaching?" "Yeah." "Do you preach well?" "Yeah." And then he said, "Well I'm the best car stealer of Cleveland, and I like it."

It's up to us to prove how we're going to use our compulsions to be the best. It's better to be the best theologian then the best car stealer, maybe, I don't know. There's also another story about the young guy who ran away from dad and he got better off then the older brother who'd been around. But the need to prove our mark, where is that coming from?

We are all frightened of suffering. The greatest suffering and the first suffering that all of us live is when at one moment we feel we're not loved by our parents. The first four months at least is that immense need of a child to have unconditional love, to be held, to be in tenderness. But somewhere is that amazing and beautiful relationship between the mother and child, and the child needs an unconditional love. My friend's daughter was four years old, and one day she came up to him and started hitting him and saying, "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you." And he said, "I saw in her eyes it was true." But it was very simple. The week before, the second child had been born. She had lost her place; she was no longer unique. Now all the family was looking at number two and not looking at her. She was wounded. I know that all of us have been hurt, and so we equate suffering with rejection, because our first suffering is a suffering of rejection. And rejection is loneliness, abandonment, anguish, that feeling of dis-ease, not feeling well, guilt: "If I'm not loved it's because I'm no good."

At the very heart of our growth there is guilt. What strikes me as I listen to people is how much guilt is in everybody, because somewhere there's induced guilt: "You are no good, you are not the one I wanted. You're not this, you're not that." All of us somewhere are struggling with guilt. There is moral guilt and psychological guilt, induced guilt and so on, but it's very deep.

I've listened to people who've been abused sexually and somewhere [they] feel that it was their fault. And you want to say, "No, it's not." But somewhere there's something very deep, that guilt that, "If I'm not loved it's because I'm not wanted. "If I'm not seen as unique it's because I'm no good." There's this terrific need to advance, to have admiration, to have power, to make our mark, and it's in all of us. It's very deep.

I remember being asked to meet a man in prison who had been condemned to death. He was in the prison of Bolduc, Montreal, Canada. I went to see him, and his body was like a block of cement or a block of ice. No emotion in the eyes, in the hands. There was nothing of any personal contact. I forget what we talked about, but all I know when I left him, that this man who had killed five women and was dangerous had a history. I was convinced that [in] his history somewhere he had been abused as a baby physically, verbally, maybe sexually - [that he had been] hated, and so right from the very beginning he had to protect himself. I'm not saying that he shouldn't be in prison. Of course, he has to be in prison; he's a dangerous guy. But let's listen to where these barriers started building, because if somebody is never looked at as a person and listened to as a person, they will never be able to see others as people.

We are wounded people, and the big question is how to grow so that we are not conditioned by wars and by proving that we are the best in a culture that pushes us to think we are or have to be the best, the most successful.

I would say that we have to go through various stages: The first stage is the conviction that every person is precious, and hopefully [this is] not just an intellectual conviction but a movement to a life conviction, somewhere in life to be convinced that each person is important, that each person is precious, that each person is sacred. If we haven't got that very deep conviction, then humanity is in danger, because who will decide that some are sacred and others are not? If somebody says to me, "What is a person?", all I can say is "I don't know." I don't know. I cannot prove anything. All I know is that a person is born from the relationship of a man and woman. It's not because they have an intellectual capacity. It's not even the certitude that they have the capacity to grow and love, because there are some people you don't know.

In our community in Uganda, we were asked to welcome a young man who had been found in the jungle. He screamed like an animal, and he walked like an animal. He was found by the military and brought to a hospital and eventually came to our community. And little by little he became human. His humanity was there but it hadn't unfolded. It was hidden because he hadn't had a mom and a dad who had nurtured him.

The wife of a friend of mine contracted Alzheimer's, and he said to me, "I didn't want to put her in an institution, so I'm looking after her. I'm feeding her, bathing her." He had been a man who had been in business and so on, and he said, "I'm becoming more human. I am becoming more human." In the last little note I had from him, he said, "In the middle of the night she woke me up, as if she had come out of the cloud of Alzheimer's, and she said, 'Darling, I just want to thank you for all you're doing for me.' And then she went back behind the cloud." And he said, "I wept. I wept because behind the Alzheimer's was her person."

Francis of Assisi, in his will or testament, the very first part of which he wrote around two years before his death, said, "I always had [a horror of] people with leprosy. And then one day the Lord led me to people with leprosy. I served them with all my heart. When I left, there was a new gentleness in my spirit and in my body, and from then on I followed the Lord."

At one moment he saw the person behind the leper. Our danger is to see what is negative in a person, what is broken in a person, and we don't see the person. That man who was with his wife believed what the person behind the sickness needed was tenderness. In my own community, we have a very beautiful woman who is now 74. She came to our community 30 years ago. She had a very severe disability. She couldn't speak, and she couldn't walk. She couldn't really eat by herself, [she was] so very fragile. Over the 30 years she's become a little bit more fragile, but she's very beautiful. The assistants called her grandma. I am touched when I see these young assistants giving her baths, feeding her, and loving her. She has acquired a peacefulness and a beauty. It's obvious that the assistants see behind her immense disabilities, because she is always in bed now. They interpret her little cries to come to her aid and relate with her and talk to her, [and they] see the person behind the disabilities.

The man I mentioned who is in prison and who had killed five women -- he needs somebody who believes that behind all those walls that have been created there's a little child who has never been awoken and, of course, nobody has ever seen him as a person. He's always defending himself and attacking, and one day he will find somebody who will reveal to him his beauty, that he is a child of God, that he is precious. And, as I said, no question he should be in prison. What sort of prison?