An alert reader spotted this item in the Washington Post, about a remarkable outreach to an often-neglected community:

Two autistic boys sat inside a parochial school classroom this month. In a setting stripped of unnecessary furniture and toys to avoid distraction, they studied pictograms of a bearded Jesus in a red sash and images of their family members and people helping each other.

“P.J. helps _ P.J. can help who?” Jennifer Aldrich, a volunteer teacher, asked 7-year-old P.J. Letizia Jr.

“Daddy and mommy,” he said.

“Yeah,” Aldrich said, “and when P.J. helps daddy and mommy he can be …”

“Like Jesus,” he said.

The program at St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church is among a handful of programs at Catholic churches exclusively for autistic children and the first in Rhode Island. It is part of a broader effort by dioceses to accommodate children with a wide range of developmental disorders or handicaps.

Dioceses in at least 31 states offer specialized religious instruction for students suffering from conditions including autism, mental retardation, emotional and learning disabilities and brain injuries, according to a 2007-2008 survey by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“To not find ways of welcoming all the people whose families want them to be part of the church community, would be not really living out our faith, I think,” said Marie Powell, executive director of the conference’s Secretariat of Catholic Education.

Religious groups have long offered classes to instruct the young in their faith but some have struggled to include and teach the autistic, who can have difficulty communicating and extremely short attention spans. In one high-profile case last year, a Catholic priest in Minnesota sought a restraining order against an autistic teenager who allegedly caused distractions by wetting himself and allegedly assaulted a child during Mass.

The program at St. Peter’s offers a nurturing and inclusive classroom setting every two weeks for children with special needs. It also helps students practice their religion by preparing them to participate in the sacraments, or ritual acts, that normally serve as milestones on the journey to young adulthood for Catholics.

Those sacraments include confessing sins to a priest and seeking absolution, receiving the Eucharist, or bread and wine that Catholics believe is changed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and being publicly confirmed into the church by a bishop.

“The whole point is Jesus is totally inclusive,” said the Rev. Roger Gagne, the pastor of St. Peter’s who celebrated Mass for the students and their families by condensing an hour-long liturgy to about 15 minutes, skipping the music, optional prayers and making a very brief homily. “He directs his followers to do the same.”

Check out more at the link. And an appreciative wave of the deacon’s stole to An Archdiocese of Wash DC Catholic.