TURIN. The bottles of beer thrown against the facade of the oratory are the least. Even if the violence of that gesture is beyond question.
What hurts Don Stefano Votta is the people’s sense of surrender in the face of the aggressiveness of the drug dealers. Those who stay all day – and all night – in the open space of Corso Palermo. They peddle, threaten, scare.
Parish of Santa Maria della Pace: full barrier of Milan. Entrance to the church and facade on Corso Giulio Cesare. Oratory on Corso Palermo. A whole block, between via Sesia and via Malone. Here on the first floor there is a kind of guesthouse of the oratory, where the children who participate in a community project live a couple of days a week together. They eat, sleep, do their homework. “It’s for grouping,” they say in church. To live the faith together.
But then they are boys. They have cell phones, they make videos, they take pictures. They also do it from those windows overlooking the shop square. Where at eight in the evening there are dozens of pushers. In a place like this, picking up the phone and filming is dangerous. It happened like this a few nights ago. The boys jump in and bottles of beer rain against the facade of the oratory. They break and the pieces end up on the football pitch and on the net spread out at wall height to prevent the ball from being kicked out. But that’s not all.
The next day one of the animators, twenty years old, a student at the University, is confronted by a pusher in the street next to the church. Via Malone. Hard-nosed he tells him it’s better not to take pictures. No weapons in hand. No physical violence. Only the threat, whispered but determined, to a boy the drug dealers know by sight. They know that it gravitates there, at the oratory. And maybe even where he lives.
In the parish now they say that he is shocked. And the parish priest very worried. “He played down with us,” says Don Stefano. “He said it was all right, that it was all right. But with his parents, he said he was afraid. So much fear ». Because that’s a mafia attitude. Of those who control the territory and want silence and lowered eyes.
Don Votta wrote all these things in a statement – agreed with Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia – and sent to the Prefecture, Police Headquarters, Mayor and Public Prosecutor’s Office. It is a cry of alarm. Indeed more. It is the request for immediate intervention to give the neighborhood a little breath. Bring back peace of mind. And legality.
«And he’s right: that area is completely out of control» thunders Valerio Lomanto, new president of the District 6. Recipes? «We need to create a table like the one that was done to solve the Moi problem. But, first of all, it takes the political will to lend a hand to the territory ».
Because if the bottles against the oratory are a signal, the threat to the animator is something else. It is, as Lomanto says: “Mafia in all respects.” Which, without fear, even tears apart the camera placed just a few weeks ago in via Malone. And that he was supposed to allow the police to check this remnant of the Barrier. Where the shop has conquered the streets. Where there are girls who prostitute themselves out in the open for a dose. Lomanto is clear: “We need to change pace”. Don Stefano spreads his arms: «We are in a land where those who live honestly are afraid. If you knew how many times, in the evening, at the end of some meeting, my parishioners ask me to leave via another exit because they do not trust to go through via Sesia and via Malone, much less on corso Palermo ». Here, this is the “sense of surrender” of which the priest spoke. –
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