Autistic Catholics find a voice: New support group fosters connection and belonging

CNA Staff, Oct 3, 2024 / 14:55 pm

Several Catholics have banded together to create a support system for Catholics on the autism spectrum. Autistic Catholics, an online resource and support group, kicked off this week with the group’s first online meeting.

Allen Obie John Smith, a Catholic convert who lives in Ridgway, Colorado, with his wife, is the founding executive director of Autistic Catholics. Inspired by his own experience with autism, Smith — who goes by his middle name, John — founded the group this past summer to help build fellowship among autistic Catholics while giving them a voice. 

“I think my own experience of feeling alone as a diagnosed autistic person really contributed the most to the founding, and I knew I wasn’t alone in my feeling of isolation,” Smith told CNA. 

The new president of Autistic Catholics, Father Matthew Schneider, an openly autistic priest, told CNA the project is a response to Pope Francis’ call to go to the peripheries, “as autistic people are often on the periphery in our society.”

Schneider, who was ordained in 2013, is a priest with the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi and teaches at St. Patrick’s Seminary near San Francisco.

Filling a niche

Schneider noted that people with autism are disproportionately more likely to be atheists. 

“If we don’t fill that niche to help autistics live a full Catholic life, non-Catholic and non-Christian groups will do that and lead autistics away from Christ and his Church,” Schneider said. “We already know we autistics are about almost twice as likely (1.84 times) to never attend church and significantly more likely to be atheists and agnostics or to make their own religious system.” 

Schneider compared this to Catholic inculturation: evangelization “where you adapt how you explain the Gospel to reach people while maintaining the whole Gospel.”

“The differences in autistic brains create differences in communication that are analogous to differences between cultures,” Schneider explained. “The Church has evangelized each culture first from outside, but the biggest evangelization happened once one from inside this culture is able to explain the Gospel in a way appropriate to that culture.”

Facing challenges: sensory overload

People with autism face a variety of challenges, some of which can directly impact their faith life. Being involved in the parish community or even attending Mass can be a challenge for a Catholic who has autism.

Schneider and Smith, when asked how Catholics can better support the autistic community, both suggested “sensory-friendly Masses.”

Sensory overload, a common experience for someone with autism, is when a person experiences hypersensitivity in one of their senses: sound, sight, taste, touch, or smell, triggering a fight-or-flight response. People with other conditions such as anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may experience this as well. 

Mass offers “various sensory challenges” and may overstimulate olfactory (sense of smell), auditory, or visual senses, Smith told CNA. The lights might be too bright, the music too loud, or the scent of incense too strong. 

As a resource for neurodivergent Catholics, Schneider developed a sensory-friendly Mass directory, which often features not only Masses designed for autistic Catholics but also low forms of the Traditional Latin Mass that are often less stimulating. Some parishes, such as St. Pius X in Rochester, New York, even offer sensory-friendly rooms for neurodivergent Catholics attending Mass.

Schneider, who was diagnosed with autism early on in his ministry, has been working to build more resources for Catholics with autism in recent years.

“I had always felt different, but having a diagnosis alerted me to how I was different,” Schneider said, recalling his diagnosis of autism in 2016.

Following his diagnosis, Schneider searched for support but found there were few resources from a Catholic or Christian perspective.

“Given autistics are about 2% of the population, I realized this is a group the Church needs to reach out to,” he said. “As an autistic priest and religious, I realized some of that fell on me.” 

Schneider has since written a book on autistic prayer as well as published shorter pieces on sensory-friendly Masses in addition to the sensory-friendly Mass directory. 

Not everyone who is autistic struggles with sensory overload at Mass, Schneider noted. 

“The first thing I would suggest for non-autistic people to do to help is to ask autistic people where you are,” Schneider said. “Autism is a spectrum and different individuals struggle most with different things.”

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Finding community

Finding community is another challenge autistic Catholics may face, whether it’s due to social differences or a lack of fellow autistic Catholics.

Smith wanted to form the group to “reach out to fellow autistic Catholics who may also be experiencing any type of loneliness, isolation, and lack of fellowship,” he said. 

“We often struggle with social clues so we can feel excluded even if that is not people’s intention,” Schneider said. 

While Autistic Catholics connects people online, Schneider suggested that parishes help initiate in-person communities.

Parishes could “help create autistic small groups where people can discuss both autistic struggles and the faith from an autistic perspective,” Schneider suggested.

People with autism may thrive among people with similar neurodivergence, but Schneider noted that there is “what is called the double-empathy problem.”

“Autistics and non-autistics seem to be able to communicate well with each other but there is often miscommunication in both directions between the two groups,” Schneider explained.

Having a voice 

In a world that offers many challenges for people on the autism spectrum, Smith believes that Catholics with autism should have a voice.

“We needed a way to communicate collectively; we needed representation from our point of view, as autistic Catholics, a special gift in and to the body of Christ,” Smith said. “I think that’s what this is: a voice of lamentation but also of joy in the gift of being autistic.”  

Smith explained that it’s important “to frame our perception from the viewpoint of those who are disabled.” 

“We may sometimes have support with sensory-friendly Masses, but our collective experience is still not yet fully apparent with regard to our family lives, work, and apostolate,” Smith said.

He hopes to make a difference by helping fellow autistic Catholics in “forming a collective voice while joining together in friendship while being encouraged to grow in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.” 

Part of this voice is sharing that autism is a gift. 

Kaitey Sheldon, a board member for Autistic Catholics and a Catholic bioethicist, noted that autistic Catholics have much to offer within the body of Christ.

“Autistics and those who are neurodivergent not only belong to the body of Christ but offer beautiful, unique gifts to the Church and to the world,” Sheldon told CNA. 

The neurodiversity movement began in the 1990s with the work of Judy Singer, a sociologist on the autism spectrum who advocated for autism and other neurological differences to be viewed as variances, not deficits.  

“It’s a beautiful flourishing of the gift of autism in and for the body of Christ, once seen as a set of ‘deficits’ now, rather, as a neurotype itself with a sense of what it means to be gifted or twice exceptional,” Smith explained.

Smith also noted that the autistic community is moving away from categorizing people as high or low functioning. Instead, the group is “simply acknowledging the variety of support needs, needs we all share, to underscore the interdependence of human flourishing rather than this ugly view of ‘self-sufficiency’ as the goal of human life,” Smith said.

“We belong with one another sharing our various support needs and growing in mutual love and appreciation of one another as gifts,” he said.

Sheldon said the apostolate is all about “uplifting every member of the body of Christ.”

“I think of this apostolate as the friends who climbed the roof with a stretcher or the father begging Jesus to come to his home to heal his daughter — we are reaching out to him, seeking his love and mercy for autistics, who too often feel they are on the outside,” Sheldon said.

Hopes for the future 

Though the project is still in its early stages, Smith said dioceses across the U.S. that he has reached out to have had “an overwhelmingly positive response.” 

“People [were] saying things like, ‘We need this.’ and ‘This is a direct response to prayer,’” he said.

“The real fellowship, however, is just beginning to form,” Smith said. “I anticipate hundreds and hundreds will find a place of acceptance, belonging, encouragement, and support while growing in faith, hope, and charity as a community of friends.”  

The board of Autistic Catholics currently includes eight members, all of whom “either are autistic and have had direct experience feeling these challenges or identify strongly with the autistic community,” Smith noted. The group is awaiting approval for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status.

Sheldon said she hopes the ministry will be “a comfortable, affirming home” for people with autism and other neurodivergent people as well as those who love them. 

“I hope it is a place where the weekly meetings bring warmth and familiarity, a sense of importance and integral belonging in the Church,” she said. “And I do hope we are able to advocate and educate in dioceses so that the next generations of Catholic autistics are raised in an inclusive Church that recognizes their goodness, belovedness, and giftedness.”