La Fraternidad Cristiana de Enfermos y Minusvalidos (F.C.E.M. - Christian Fraternity of the Sick and Handicapped) is a church movement within the bounds of Lay Preaching and is part of the Catholic Action. It has grown from the need to help those suffering from illness and physical limitations and it wants us to look at and reflect on the situation which those who are seriously disabled are in. It does so, like other years but especially day to day, and far from the sounding board of events to celebrate the International Day for disabled people. It wants to focus attention on the group of chronically-ill, physically handicapped and *sensory handicapped people who are most affected. Those, who because of their special characteristics and who represent a very important group within the whole, continue to be on the fringe of real inclusion programmes. People who from a markedly utilitarian social context, even within the associated environment, are considered objects of attention, passive beneficiaries and *not subject to promotion, major figures in their own history.

They still represent the obscurity a society like ours, which considers profitability to be the supreme economic indicator, condemns them to and leaves aside those who don't produce or manufacture.

It has to be said that it does so with typical welfare benefit politics. With pathetically low pensions/benefits which condemn, as well as the dependence that their particular conditions create, there is an economic dependence which curtails any efforts to move towards personal autonomy. We have a system and tax regulations that instead of direct aid, give tax deductions. In the majority of situations, for example in the case of Income Tax, these people do not do a tax declaration because they do not reach the minimum income.

We have taxes which make the goods we consume more expensive, independent of salary and in the case of some medication not included in the Social Security system, articles for rehabilitation and orthopedics and other essential products, their prices are excessively high and intolerable.

*The low incomes received by the weakest and most vulnerable groups morally question the state of welfare which some boast about.

Finally, with our eyes on Jesus of Nazareth, who shows us the face of God and preference for the poor and forgotten, we are led to condemn the reality so that we can try to change it. We cannot forget other brothers and sisters whose suffering we are not indifferent to: immigrants, battered women and children, handicapped in the Third World...and whose cry for freedom in a just world, more than anything, is our own.

Fraternidad Cristiana de Enfermos y Minusválidos
General Committee Spain, November 2000