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Catholic activist invokes spiritual power of the disabled
Friday, March 11, 2005

By Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When Mary Jane Owen was hospitalized with pneumonia, her doctor suggested that she decline antibiotics.

She was, after all, elderly, blind and used a wheelchair.

"He thought pneumonia would be such a wonderful way to die," said Owen, who fired him and continued her career as a disability activist.

"It lets me know how some doctors value my life."

It fueled her activism on behalf of Terry Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman whose parents are trying to stop her husband from disconnecting her feeding tube. She has also denounced the movie "Million Dollar Baby" for what she calls its unrealistic portrayal of the options after spinal injury.

Owen, who spoke last night at St. Paul Seminary in East Carnegie, formerly worked with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and has spoken at the Vatican. She is founder and national director of Disabled Catholics in Action.

Her criticisms of the Schiavo case are many. She cites affidavits from friends and nurses who swear that Schiavo recognizes them and can swallow unaided. Newly published research shows that when loved ones speak to someone in a "permanent vegetative state," there is activity in the parts of the brain that would respond in a normal person, she said.

The Oscars rewarded two films about killing disabled people. Owen has no quarrel with "The Sea Within," about a quadriplegic who campaigned for the right to assisted suicide, because it is a true story.

But "Million Dollar Baby" was a fantasy about a paralyzed boxer in a hospital where no one offered rehabilitation, where she rapidly developed bed sores so severe that her leg was amputated, and where the medical staff was indifferent, she said.

"It feeds into the most negative fears of people who don't know that much about disability anyway," she said.

"Not every person who is newly quadriplegic is going to want to work through rehabilitation, but at the very least they should get to know some people who have made that transition. This is an artful attempt to promote and normalize euthanasia."

Owen was not born disabled. The daughter of two Methodist ministers, she was teaching in the graduate school of social work at San Francisco State University in the 1960s and 1970s when she lost her eyesight. She quit teaching.

"I didn't realize what people with blindness could do. I didn't know anybody who was blind. That's the sad thing about disability. We often don't know the people who are successful," she said.

She had a poorly understood genetic condition, which 30 years later was unexpectedly cured by a cornea transplant undertaken solely to stop pain. Cumulative car accidents put her in a wheelchair in 1986. Surgery for an inner ear problem left her partially deaf.

In 1979, she joined the Carter administration as a consultant on disability issues, and eventually moved to church work. She was struck by how many disability activists are estranged from their faith. When she began asking if there was a Catholic theology of disability, she was told it was "the theology of the wounded Christ."

"I said, well that is probably why so many people who are disabled have fallen away. They don't identify with their brokenness as much as with what they can do. It dawned on me that the theology of disability should be the theology of resurrection," she said.

"So many of the saints have been disabled. I think they recognize the power of the soul or the spirit."

(Ann Rodgers can be reached at arodgers@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416.)