A ministry of prayer, study, and writing

'God's given me so much."

Robin McCarthy says this, with slightly slurred speech, from her wheelchair. Because of the cerebral palsy she has lived with all her 38 years, the Lowell woman's head bobs occasionally as she speaks and her eyes roll upward .

Yet her sense of a life bathed in blessings honed the desire to be a Catholic nun she originally felt when making her First Communion at 7.

This spring, she is to be consecrated into the Sisters for a Christian Community, an unusual order founded in the reformist flush after the Second Vatican Council. Five other religious communities had rejected her because of her disability, says McCarthy, who walks with limited mobility and uses her wheelchair for convenience.

"What a soul, hidden in a broken body," exclaims Sister Marie-Paul Jaston, New England regional coordinator of the Sisters for a Christian Community.

What warring emotions divided McCarthy's aunt as she contemplated her 2-year-old niece? McCarthy's parents had an unfit household for her, she says; institutionalizing the girl would have been tempting. Her aunt and uncle took her in "with the idea of giving me back to my mother and father if it ever became possible. It just never did."

She began a marathon of treatment, including a decade of physical therapy and almost two decades of speech training.

She couldn't walk in any appreciable sense until she was 5, and she wore leg braces into her mid-teens. Her uncle would carry her into Mass each week until she could walk in on her own.

"I am way more connected to the Catholic side of myself than I am the disability," says McCarthy. "It's not the overriding concern of my life. I was born with it, which sounds awful, but frankly, because I've never known any other way of life, you sort of can't miss what you never possessed."

By contrast, the orders that refused her focused precisely on what she didn't possess.

"Historically, it's very true that people with disabilities had a lot of difficulty being accepted into religious communities," says Karen Murray, coordinator for the Archdiocese of Boston's Office for Persons with Disabilities. "It's getting better, but I still do hear stories [of people] turned down."

The archdiocese doesn't track its number of disabled clergy and nuns, she says.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter almost 30 years ago that called for respecting and accommodating the disabled. In McCarthy's view, the church has not lived up to that call.

"I know of people -- and I know this to be true -- that have had babies born with disabilities and were told [by priests], 'Why baptize them?' . . . I know many priests that would be appalled to know that this goes on, and I know many priests serve disabled people very well."

Yet the religious orders that wouldn't take her said their convents were not accessible to the handicapped, mirroring, she says, a broader problem of lack of access to sacramental places. She's aware of only a few churches with accessible confessionals, for example.

Priests are willing to meet disabled penitents elsewhere, but that requires face-to-face confessions, without the confessional's anonymity, "which takes our rights away to some degree."

Murray, who also uses a wheelchair, says there's a general trend among churches to replace the confessional booth with a confessional room, where people have the option of facing the priest or sitting behind a screen for anonymity. "We probably need to make some greater awareness of that," she says.

As for bias, she considers the church more enlightened than its surrounding environment. "In general, I don't think society looks at disability and sees something beautiful, where in the church, they do see that. . . . The soul of that person is every bit as beautiful in the eyes of God as the soul of the greatest genius."

The Sisters for a Christian Community do not have convents. The nuns live in their own homes, as does McCarthy, so accessibility wasn't at issue. Then there were the positive attributes of the woman herself.

"We knew from the beginning she had a very religious soul," Jaston says. "When she met two of our sisters in Lowell, they could sense this."

While nuns in the order provide a variety of ministries, McCarthy's physical limitations will make hers a ministry of prayer, study, and writing. "All she is required to do is to live what God has given her. . . . Disability is her mission."

For her part, McCarthy hopes to provide a role model for families with disabled children, grieving over what they see as defective, unable to imagine anything else.

As her life shows, she says, "sometimes, you have to do the unimaginable to prove a point."

Questions, comments or story ideas can be sent to spiritual@globe.com.