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François Vauraut sat down in a gray suit and a red tie on the set of CNews on Wednesday afternoon, two days before Pope Leo XIV lands in Paris, and told the host what Saturday means to him.
“The pope is going to bless me, and everyone with Down syndrome, like me,” he said. “It really touches me that I will be with him.”
François is one of six young people with trisomy 21 whom the Fondation Jérôme Lejeune has sent to serve at the pope’s Mass on Saturday morning at Place de la Concorde, where the Diocese of Paris says more than 450,000 people have registered. They will stand in their albs among 400 altar servers from every corner of France, a few steps from the sanctuary and the pope.
The foundation that sent him carries the name of the geneticist who in 1959 published the discovery of the extra copy of chromosome 21. Leo received the Lejeune families at the Vatican on June 22 and spoke plainly about what happened next.
Jérôme Lejeune, he said, “soon realized that his scientific discovery would be used to eliminate people with Down syndrome before they were born.” The pope had a name for that: “chromosomal racism.”
Ten children with Down syndrome came to Rome with their parents, and Leo went down to each of them, one at a time. An eleven-year-old named Théophile was asked afterward what he had said to the pope. “I just told him that I love him,” he answered.
Leo also spoke to the adults in the room. “The value of the human person does not depend on what he or she accomplishes or produces. The common good excludes no one who has been created in the image and likeness of God.”
Hold that sentence up against what’s happening in Washington.
In April, Eli Hager of ProPublica reported that the Trump administration is writing a rule to cut Supplemental Security Income for disabled adults who live with their families. The mechanism is an old accounting device called in-kind support and maintenance: the government assigns a dollar value to the bedroom a disabled son or daughter sleeps in at home, treats it as income, and docks the check by as much as a third.
By ProPublica’s reading of the Social Security Administration’s own actuarial figures, as many as 400,000 people could see their benefits cut or ended, including families already poor enough to qualify for food stamps.
Shy’tyra Burton is twenty-two and has Down syndrome. She lives in Philadelphia with her father, Rondell, a sanitation worker, and her $994 monthly check could lose $330 under the plan.
“I’m still barely managing, though,” Rondell told Hager. “It’s a trickle-down effect. My daughter absorbs money stress in her body.” Jeremiah Foster, eighteen, also has Down syndrome, lives at home with his mother, Opal, and is training to be a chef; the rule would treat the roof over his head as a reason to pay him less.
Galen Carey of the National Association of Evangelicals, whose thirty-five-year-old son has Down syndrome and receives SSI, put the moral question this way:
“Knowing that they are contributing and not a burden to the family can be a source of great pride.” The White House budget office, through spokeswoman Rachel Cauley, called the story “false because it speculates about policies that have not yet been decided.” Notice what that denial does not say: that the idea is dead.
On Thanksgiving Day last year, the president of the United States went on Truth Social and called Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota “seriously retarded.”
Researchers at Montclair State University counted what followed: posts using the slur rose 225.7 percent on X, more than 1.1 million of them in seven days. Joe Rogan had already announced the word’s return in April 2025. “
The word ‘retarded’ is back,” he told his audience, “and it’s one of the great cultural victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts.”
Wall Street got the permission slip too. After the 2024 election, a top banker told the Financial Times, “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.… It’s a new dawn.”
None of this began in 2024.
On November 24, 2015, at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in South Carolina, Donald Trump waved his arms with his hands bent at an odd angle while impersonating Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter born with arthrogryposis, a condition that limits the movement of his joints.
“Now the poor guy, you gotta see this guy,” Trump said. “Uhh I don’t know what I said. Uhh I don’t remember.” Two days later he insisted he had no idea what Kovaleski looked like.
The crowd in Myrtle Beach laughed, and the country went on to elect him twice anyway — which tells you the impersonation was never a liability for him, only part of the offer.
So we have two pictures of what a person with Down syndrome is for.
On Saturday, six of them will stand in white near the altar of the American pope in front of hundreds of thousands of people, because the Church has decided (and Leo has said aloud) that the extra chromosome changes nothing about the image of God in them.
The view from Washington treats those same people as a budget line, with a slur attached, and the man at the top has been modeling the slur for a decade.
Catholic social teaching offers no middle position here.
Leo has spent his papacy saying so in one setting after another, from Lampedusa, where he insisted that “dignity has no passport,” to Rimini, where he said that “before borders, there are always persons.” Saturday is that same sentence applied to a chromosome, spoken by a God who, as I wrote this summer, is in love with our smallness.
François Vauraut already knows the ending. “It is going to be good,” he told CNews. He is right, and this community exists to say why.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with François and with Shy’tyra Burton and Jeremiah Foster, alongside the millions of American Catholics and people of goodwill who believe that a person’s worth was settled at creation and that a bedroom in a father’s house is a home, whatever an actuary calls it, because no president gets to decide who is a burden.
In a political culture that has taught itself to laugh at the disabled again, we remain rooted in a faith that puts them beside the altar.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and cruelty dressed up as candor. They are looking for courage, and for a love that shows itself in what it is willing to pay. On Saturday, in front of the world, six young people will show what that looks like.
If you believe this movement matters, Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a government that has put a price on a disabled child’s bedroom, I am asking you to join us.
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The Orange POtuS knows no low! He is the devil on Earth!!!
I’m a retired special education teacher. I taught students with Down Syndrome cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injuries, developmental delays, behavior disorders and learning disabilities. I taught these students at the elementary, middle and high school levels. Middle school was my favorite. I’m just curious about when diversity in learning is approached why are only students with Down Syndrome are the focus? Is that the most acceptable disability?
It’s disgusting that Trump has made it acceptable to use the word retarded. I started teaching in 1974 and we educators worked very hard to remove that word from common vocabulary.