Suffering Servant, unable to sin

Seeing Christ in the old age home, much less in the mentally ill. This has
been elusive for me. I am a product of the value-transfer society. You need to
exchange value to get the money to eat. What to do when society does not value
you anymore? Go outside the society to God, according to Cardinal Javier Lozano
Barragán, president of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers.

http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=84685

The statement is that: the mentally ill person is not a deformed image of God but, rather, a faithful image of God, our Lord. If we want to separate from the Kingdom of God, we can do so only with an evil heart, to which Christ our Lord refers, and from which all the sins come.

Therefore, once the mental illness has caused such a disorder as to take away from the mentally ill patient any responsibility for his actions -- qualifying them as separation from the divine will, as a sin -- the mental patient cannot separate from God.

In other words, the image of God in him cannot be distorted. In this case his knowledge or his volitive option is no longer sufficient to motivate any human action that separates him from God. His bodily and psychic conditions do not allow him to commit a grave sin, given that in his state of disequilibrium he does not have that full knowledge and ability of assent required to sin.

If we approach the argument from this point of view, whereby the mentally ill patient does not have the knowledge or the faculty of full consent required to commit a mortal sin, his is not a deformed image of God, since that image can only be deformed by sin. Certainly, it is the suffering image of God, but not a deformed image. He is a reflection of the mystery of the victorious Cross of the Lord. Inspired by the image of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh (Isaiah 53:1-7) we are drawn to a conscious act of faith in the suffering Christ.

It is not by chance that in the old popular Mexican language, a mad person was called "bandito," that is, "blessed"; […] without the full use of reasoning, he was unable to commit sin and was, therefore, destined to eternal life.

It is true that the objective disorder of sin and its consequences are manifest in the mentally ill patient; however, at the same time, there is in him the historical equilibrium of the only possible order, the order and equilibrium of the Redemption.

This is not comprehensible to a secularized mentality; it is only understood within the context of Christian optimism, which stems from a reasoned faith that tells us how in such circumstances our obligations towards a mentally ill person, on one hand, satisfy our duty to see the suffering Christ in the poor and less protected; and on the other hand the idea of seeing in the patient the love of God who has indicated him as his chosen one, in the sense that he shall not be separated from Him.