The welcome to migrants, the no to “an economy that kills man and the planet” and the arms race. There is all this, in the first Christmas Letter without the signature of don Pierluigi Di Piazza, presented at the Balducci center.
There is a photo of Don Pierluigi, opening the seven pages of the letter and clearly visible on the table, where sit his “heir” at the head of the Zugliano reception center, Don Paolo Iannaccone, and six other signatories. And even the title, Primavera di Umanità, seems to have come from the pen and passion of Don Di Piazza, who passed away on 15 May.
If the homage to the deceased priest is the obligatory incipit, to mark the Letter 2022 there is a war at the gates of Europe, which Don Di Piazza had time to see explode, but which one Christmas ago was not yet .
It is a war that shakes and divides consciences and sensitivities, even among those who seek in the Gospel, as well as in their own conscience, the difficult answer to the question whether peace is always and in any case a possible answer, or if there is a legitimate use of force in the face of aggression.
However, there is a certainty in the signatories: «We do not want to resign ourselves – they write – to the conflicts that pit people against people. On March 27, the pontiff affirmed “the need to repudiate war, a place of death where fathers and mothers bury their children, where men kill their brothers without even having seen them, where the powerful decide and the poor die”.
Hence the no to war “considered the normal means of resolving international disputes”, the concern for the “profound crisis of the United Nations system, for the “decisions for a robust increase in military spending” and the appeal for membership of Italy to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The recent no, with Italy abstaining, to a resolution in support of that treaty represents, for the signatories, a very bad sign: «Putin’s invasion, in addition to having brought destruction and death to Ukrainian cities, had the effect a heavy setback of any international progress on disarmament and peace.
But war is not the only theme of a letter which, as usual, also speaks of immigration, hospitality, the growth of poverty and hardship. “We cannot close our eyes – explains Don Iannaccone – in the face of situations of indifference and exclusion experienced by so many people, the aggravation of situations of poverty, migrations”.
Under the title “Migrations and their narratives”, the letter recalls that Italians residing abroad (5.8 million) are more numerous than foreigners residing in our country (5.2 million), recalls the 50,000 people who died 2014 on immigration routes, recalls that more than 80% of the planet’s refugees, more than 100 million in 2022, “come and find refuge in southern hemisphere countries”, finding the doors of Europe and the West closed.
Not statistics, “but people, brothers and sisters of this humanity, your ‘neighbor’ for Jesus of Nazareth and for those who believe in him”. Migrants, the poor, the drama of prisons and also of many barracks, where the number of suicides is growing, are the other themes consigned to the hope of a new “Springtime of humanity”.
Not without a final dedication, which Pierluigi di Piazza would have liked, in memory of Hebe De Bonafini, one of the 14 founders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who died a month ago at the age of 93.
THE SIGNATURES
In addition to those of Don Paolo Iannaccone, president of the Balducci center, and of the other priests present in Zugliano, Albino Bizzotto, Renzo De Ros, Fabio Gollinucci, Pierino Ruffato and Franco Saccavini, the letter bears the signatures of the priests Alberto De Nadai, Antonio Santini , Giacomo Tolot, Gianni Manziega, Luigi Fontanot, Mario Vatta, Massimo Cadamuto, Nandino Capovilla, Piergiorgio Rigolo and Andrea Bellavite. Esodo (Venice) and Walking together (Trieste) are also members of the Balducci center as associations.