The Rev. Daniel Walz has banned an Autistic Child and there family from attending St. Joeseph Catholic Church in Bertha, MN.  The article further states that…. “The family’s request for certain accommodations — such as clearing aisles when the family leaves church — have gone unfulfilled”.

Standing more than six feet tall and weighing more than 225 pounds, 13-year-old Adam Race cuts an imposing figure for his age.

Adam is also severely autistic, and his meltdowns during mass at the Catholic church in Bertha, Minn., have prompted a public battle between the parish priest and Adam’s parents.

The Rev. Daniel Walz, disturbed by what he said is Adam’s dangerous behavior, filed court papers to bar him from the Church of St. Joseph with a temporary restraining order against his parents. The Races are ignoring the order, which they see as discriminatory, and getting support from advocates for the disabled.

The battle started last summer, according to Adam’s mother, Carol Race, when Walz came to the family house along with a church trustee and “made kind of a federal case out of the situation with my son.”

The church counters that it “explored and offered many options for accommodations that would assist the family while protecting the safety of parishioners. The family refused those offers of accommodation.”

The Races and their five children typically sat in either the church’s cry room or in the back pew to avoid disrupting other parishioners since they began attending in 1996, according to Carol Race.

No one had complained to them about Adam until the priest’s visit last June, she said.

“He said that we did not discipline our son. He said that our son was physically out of control and a danger to everyone at church,” she said. “I can’t discipline him out of his autism, and I think that’s what our priest is expecting.”

The family continued attending mass, she said, trying to calm Adam and leaving during the closing hymn to avoid interacting with other parishioners on the way out.

Months later, after failed attempts to make peace with Walz, the family received a letter asking them to stop bringing Adam to church, Carol said.

In 2005, the St. Cloud diocese gave her an award for her efforts to encourage families with disabled children to attend mass, she said. The award cited her “untiring efforts … to educate and advocate for others who have children with disruptive disabilities such as autism and seek to participate as a total family at Sunday mass.”

The family continued taking him along, however. Then, last week, Carol and her husband, John, were slapped with the restraining order. The following Sunday — Mother’s Day — the family brought Adam to church anyway. Carol said a police officer cited her this week and she is scheduled to appear in court Monday.

A call to the parish office was not returned Friday. A statement released by the Diocese of St. Cloud said the church filed the petition “as a last resort out of a growing concern for the safety of parishioners and other community members due to disruptive and violent behavior on the part of that child.”

Walz, the church’s pastor for three years, said in an affidavit that as Adam has grown, the situation has worsened, and the boy has been “extremely disruptive and dangerous” since last summer.

Walz alleges that Adam struck a child during mass and has nearly knocked elderly people over when he abruptly bolts from church. He also spits and sometimes urinates in church and fights efforts to restrain him, Walz wrote.

The pastor wrote that Adam’s parents often sit on him during mass to restrain him, and sometimes bind his hands and feet, pulling a rope under the pew so his father can control the line from behind.

Walz wrote that Adam once pulled an adolescent girl — an exchange student staying with the family — on top of him, grabbing her thighs and buttocks. And, at Easter, Walz alleged, Adam ran from the church, got into the family van and started it, then got into someone else’s car, started it and revved up the engine.

“There were people directly in front of the car who could have been injured or killed if he had put the car in gear” Walz wrote.

Carol offered a different perspective. She said her son once brushed against a parishioner who almost lost balance. Adam makes spitting faces but doesn’t actually spit, she said, and he has an occasional incontinence problem.

She and John sometimes sit on him because their weight is calming to him, she said. He pulled the exchange student onto his lap for that reason, she said, and wasn’t grabbing at her.

They also use soft fleece strips to sometimes bind Adam’s hands and occasionally his feet because it calms him, she said.

The Easter incident occurred when Adam got into the driver’s seat of a car that had already been started and revved the engine because he’s drawn to engines, she said.

The family’s request for certain accommodations — such as clearing aisles when the family leaves church — have gone unfulfilled, she said.

Making Peace

Tim Kasemodel of Wayzata, who met the Race family through joint autism advocacy efforts, went with his wife and their autistic son to join the Races at church on Mother’s Day.

“What are we supposed to do, literally lock our kids away so no one has to see this for the rest of their lives?” Kasemodel said. “Adam’s a big boy and he is intimidating because they don’t understand him. Adam makes sounds like any kid, but there were babies making a heck of a lot more ruckus than Adam was.”

Brad Trahan, founder of the RT Autism Awareness Foundation in Rochester, has asked the bishop in St. Cloud to rescind the restraining order and the citation “because it isn’t going to resolve the situation.”

“It’s unfathomable and concerns me that we’ve taken a situation with special needs and we’re making it into the criminal matter,” Trahan said. Carol, meanwhile, said she hopes the controversy doesn’t reflect badly on her church.

“The church isn’t bad. But it’s what some individuals do within the church,” she said.

So I have mixed thoughts on this - yes I agree an Autistic Person may be disruptive to church functions, but at what point does it become acceptable to ban a child from a church because of there disability?