Through Catholic Lenses
Before I spoke about if autistic children should receive first Communion. They should, in case you missed that post. One family in New Jersey, the Rizzos, went even further and developed a program to help with autistic kids seeking first Communion. Several months back, I was at a conference and they gave me a copy of the Adaptive First Eucharist Preparation Kit from Loyola Press.
I decided to do a little unboxing of it, unscripted. Here’s the result.
The kit was developed for their autistic daughter, Danielle. The two parents helped and the son did it as his Eagle Scout project.
I generally find the kit helpful and in accord with norms for the reception of Communion by those with special needs. I won’t give tons of details here as you can watch the above video for my unboxing and review.
You can also check out the life of the Rizzos with their autistic daughter on their Facebook page, Autism with the Rizzos. I think that this family is helping raise awareness and acceptance in the Catholic community. We can so often not notice these invisible disabilities. They post about their family life raising an autistic daughter who is non-verbal and struggles even with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). I spoke with her at the same conference. Her iPad had a text to speech program with pictures, but she and I still struggled to communicate.
Hopefully, this will be the first in a series of videos. I recorded a bunch earlier and finally got around to editing them. I won’t publish more than once a week.
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