Legally blind student lectors at Mass

By Bill Doyle
CFP Correspondent

PAXTON - Anna Maria College junior Olivia Leger is legally blind, so she needs to be escorted from the front row of chairs at Madore Chapel to the lectern, and she admits she’s nervous whenever she speaks publicly. Nevertheless, she thrives as a lector, reading Scripture at Masses at the college.
“I guess I just tell myself, ‘Well, it’s too late to back out now,’” she said.
The 21-year-old psychology major from Westminster said lectoring makes her feel much more connected to her college community.
“I guess it’s a way for me to be something more than the blind girl people see around campus,” she said.
Miss Leger said she felt she was viewed as the “blind girl” more so when she attended Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School in Fitchburg and that Anna Maria students are more open-minded and willing to look past her vision problems and her sight cane.
Miss Leger was baptized in the Catholic church, but she didn’t attend Mass until after she enrolled in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) program at Anna Maria as a sophomore. She had long wanted to explore the Catholic faith, and the RCIA program gave her that chance.
This fall, Deacon John A. Franchi asked Miss Leger if she would be interested in lectoring at Mass and she accepted the challenge.
“I guess I felt that God had presented this opportunity to me,” she said, “and that I should take it.”
“I was just so impressed with her,” Deacon Franchi said. “She’s such a humble person and they say out of adversity comes greatness.”
Linda Nolin, Anna Maria’s director of graduate business programs and a regular attendee at Mass, prints the readings for Miss Leger in 72 font, six times larger than the normal 12 font.
“I was nervous, but I felt really good after I did it,” Miss Leger said. “I felt sort of accomplished, sort of empowered, like this was something that I could do.”
“She’s outstanding,” Deacon Franchi said. “Her diction, her presentation, her voice inflection, everything is just spot on. You can ask anyone who attends here and they’ll tell you.”
Singing and performing in musical theater beginning in middle school, and more recently as a member of the chorus in the Anna Maria drama club performance of “The Addams Family,” helped prepare her to read Scripture in front of her fellow students and staff, including President Mary Lou Retelle.
“I hope that I would be able to inspire someone,” she said. “I think that it’s really important for people with any kind of disability to know that we can do the same things that everyone else can do. We might have to do them a bit differently or with a bit of help, but we can still do the things that we want to do.”
An excellent student, Miss Leger is a member of the National Honor Society with a 3.95 grade point average.
She read from the Book of Daniel at Mass on Dec. 7. She is scheduled to read again on Jan. 18 after Christmas break. Rev. David W. Cotter, pastor at St. Columba Parish in Paxton, is the chaplain at Anna Maria.
Miss Leger was born 23 weeks premature, an hour and 20 minutes before her twin sister and Anna Maria roommate, Victoria. They are the only children of Diane and Robert Leger.
Eyeglasses solve Victoria’s vision problems, but she has asthma and kidney disease.
Olivia’s retinas at the back of her eyes were much more delicate than usual and caused a significant amount of vision loss. Nevertheless, she could read fairly normally until she was 15, when she was declared legally blind after a severe retinal detachment robbed her of much of her vision in her left eye.
“There is a solid spot in the middle of my vision that I can’t see through, a white spot,” she said. “So I have no central vision in that eye at all.”
Her peripheral vision in the eye is blurry.
Despite two less severe retinal detachments, she can still read large letters with her right eye. Anything more than three or four feet away starts to blur, however, even though she wears eyeglasses.
She fell into what she called a “fairly bad depression” for six months to a year after losing much of her sight at age 15.
“I still did things because I didn’t want anybody to know how depressed I was,” she said, “but I was not happy. I felt like I couldn’t do anything anymore. I felt like, ‘What was the point of me still being here if I couldn’t do the things that I used to be able to do?’”
She needed help even walking at first. Fortunately, her vision loss has stabilized and she’s adjusted with the help of a folding sight cane.
“I actually didn’t want to use it for the first few years after I became legally blind,” she admitted, “because I didn’t want to be labeled as blind, I suppose. I didn’t want that judgment from people so I tried to hide how little I could see and how much I needed help and that was probably hindering because with the sight cane I can navigate around on my own much better.”
Miss Leger said her vision loss no longer depresses her.
“Honestly, it doesn’t bother me that much,” she said, “because I can still do things like read and navigate on my own fairly well.”