Don Claudio Burgio: against the banality of good – Silvia Nucini

The community, which is based in Vimodrone, just outside Milan, currently hosts fifty children between the ages of 14 and 20, divided into various apartments. They arrive here sent by social services, as an alternative to prison or for probation, the measure that the defendant can request and which, if successful, suspends the crime. “But many come to us alone: ​​they show up at the door, go in, ask if they can stop. The community is very popular with young people,” Burgio says. The fact that the gates are always open, day or night, is one of the reasons for this popularity. “As soon as they arrive, they tend to take advantage of the freedom. We are not afraid of transgressions and they have a hard time abandoning them, because they come from worlds that are full of them”. In the early years of the community, he admits, he went around all night looking for his boys in the local discos. “At one point I had arranged to take them there myself, and pick them up in the morning. Now, however, I sleep. I understood that it is not that closeness they need, and I know that, in any case, they will all come back”.

Burgio has decided that we will not go to any restaurant, we will eat here, together with minors awaiting trial, the most difficult group to manage. The food that arrives on the long table was prepared together with Davide, a professional chef, detained for twenty years, who comes here every Wednesday to teach us that cooking is a bit like life: it is done with what is there , and if the food is good it is thanks to everyone, even the one who washes the dishes. Sitting among the boys are also the operators, some with a difficult past, and then there is Alain, the former assisted by Kayrós. “The community was born just for him: he arrived as a boy from Cameroon as a promise of football and was then literally left on the street. The families of my parish at the time began to take turns hosting him. And I asked myself: who is the priest? Me or them? And to regularize its welcome, I founded the community together with Giusy, an educator who, like me, has always lived with the boys”. Giusy has just become the pedagogical coordinator of Kayrós.

This living together, mixing private life and work, makes the difference, restores the feeling that the community is something that resembles a family. “And in fact there are those who stay even beyond the time established by law, because they don’t feel ready to leave completely yet. And who, once out, comes to visit us on Sunday, with his wife and children”.

Claudio Burgio, before being a don, was a boy who grew up in Giambellino, a difficult suburb of Milan, “in the years of heroin, when you played in the gardens while the older ones holed up on the benches”. But that is not his story because his family – mother teacher and father who arrived with a cardboard suitcase from Sicily, “a life similar, at least at the beginning, to that of today’s foreign immigrants” – support him in his interests: music, study. During his high school years he almost by chance finds himself volunteering in a community and is deeply struck by the discovery of forms of discomfort that he did not imagine. After high school he enrolled in ancient literature but, without even telling his friends, he also entered the seminary, “to understand if that was the answer to the questions I was hearing”. In 1996 he was ordained a priest and began to devote himself to children just a little younger than him. While we are talking, some volunteers take away broken doors: “It often happens”, he explains to me, “that they take it out on objects”.

Violence and bullying exist outside and also inside the community, but here we try to intervene immediately, “in a dynamic and systemic way, in which the victims are also called to play an active role”. Among the guests of the community there are many of those responsible for the episodes of violence mentioned in the newspapers, who have described them as part of a phenomenon, a side effect of the pandemic. “But the truth is that crimes have decreased, the numbers say it And since I don’t like simplistic explanations, I believe that the lockdown has only accelerated complex phenomena that were already in motion before,” says Burgio.

Certainly in the last two years the boys have become more difficult, closed, resistant. And the consumption of substances now affects practically all adolescents, with disastrous results, especially when it comes to “anaesthetics and psychiatric drugs costing 50 cents”.

The community tries to offer an alternative to anesthesia of any kind, restoring meaning to everyone’s life. “There is a lot of talk about the banality of evil, but the truth is that we adults present good in a banal way: four ethical norms, facade stuff. Evil, on the other hand, fascinates because it is immediate, concrete. We must try to make the good interesting, true, concrete”. Making mistakes, even a lot, is part of life. “Provocation is a pro-vocation: an invitation to go further. Even with your eyes: if you stop to observe the lives of these kids today, you get depressed. But if you have patience and hope, you look far ahead, if you look at the children of those who have passed through here, you tell yourself that all of this, even this effort, makes sense”.