Benedict XVI's visit:
Hope for a demoralized city
by Franco La Cecla
Translated from the 10/3/10 issue of
The Holy Father arrives today in a city which is the symbol for a more general situation - that of the South of Italy, which in the last 15 years has seen a widening socio-economic gap from the regions to the north.
The reasons are the general crisis that has aggravated its specific circumstances: a society that has been fundamentally blocked in its roles and its possibilities.
Palermo, my city, is in fact held in a straitjacket that makes it difficult for young people, the less protected, and the have-nots to move ahead.
This has led to an enormous diaspora of young people (but even of men in their 40s and 50s, along with their families), a draining of vital energies that are frustrated here and which seek hope elsewhere.
Left behind, the weakest members of society remain easy prey to organized crime, and in the best of cases, to the worst kind pf welfare assistance.
In this city, one is often employed only because someone has done you the favor of being allowed to work in a jungle of under-employment and under-contracted jobs or 'socially useful work'.
A noticeable decline of services and institutions makes life in Palermo ever more impoverished and risky.
A paradoxical example is that of urban services, which has been privatized and which has led to teh suspension of a large part of the clean-up of city streets and other public places.
If one goes through the popular neighborhoods of the city center - Danisinni, Albergheria, Kalsa itself, which will be the setting for the Pope's visit - one will observe ever more concerning pockets of poverty, the closing down of asylums and structures intended to help and protect indigent children, women, families and young people in need.
The degradation which Don Puglisi* denounced decades ago in the neighborhoods most prey to the Mafia is even worse and more widespread today, according to the parish priests of Brancaccio (where Don Puglisi worked and was assassinated), of Borgo and rundown suburbs like Zen and Bonagia.
*
[Don Puglisi (Fr. Puglisi) will be mentioned often during the visit. Pino Puglisi was a parish priest in Palermo who decided to fight the Mafia openly, urging his parishioners with the call "What if someone did something?". In 1993, a gunman walked up to him in front of his parish church and shot him pointblank. In 1999, the diocese of Palermo launched the cause for his beatification.]
Volunteer workers find it increasingly difficult to find resources, room to work in, or a listening ear in institutions - and violence is starting to take hold in situations which appeared to have reached some equilibrium, according to the sanitation workers in the Danissini neighborhood behind the Cathedral.
Church officials have often made appeals to city institutions, the mayor, the communal council not to forget the citizenry, especially those who are most in need.
Unemployment has increased alarmingly - Palermo has one of the highest rates in the country. The lack of concern and the ongoing degradation of urban life has led to desperate moves by the people, who have set street fires and roadblocks and occupied City Hall to manifest their despair.
Yet in this frontier-like atmosphere, the city has not skimped on spending for superficial work designed to provide a facade, to the point that it has even affected one of the most beloved popular religious feasts in Palermo. The feast of Santa Rosalia is losing its populist character as it is being transformed by city authorities into a mediatic and showy kermesse.
In the city, hope is embodied by some courageous parish priests, by a civilian society that rebels against paying protection money, and by an unexpected capacity to 'coexist' on the part of immigrant communities.
In fact, Palermo has not experienced any case of racial discrimination among thousands of Tamils, Sri Lankans, Cape Verdians, Mauritians, Filipinos, and North African immigrants. They have been integrated to the point that they now participate inhe'acchianata', the penitential ascent of Monte Pellegrino, dedicated to Santa Rosalia.
In short, there is also a Palermo that hopes and works so that the city may remain a livable place with or without the help of its institutions.
Palermo has a great tradition of vitality and variety, with a populist component that brings substance to the city's many feast days with their creative participation, even if never before has this magnificent citizenry been so humiliated.
Benedict XVI's visit could give the city a vital boost of hope.
ABOUT PALERMO
It is rather shocking to read such a blunt account of Palermo by a native, when one has thought of it all along as the exciting, colorful and exotic metropolis that is a heady, bewildering tourist delight for its unique overlay of cultures - and whose patches of urban blight one considers to be part of its raffish character much as it is in Naples. Anyway, objectively....
Palermo is the regional capital of Sicily, which is the largest and most heavily populated (about 5,000,000) island in the Mediterranean. The city itself has about 900,000 residents.
The area has been under numerous dominators over the centuries, including Roman, Carthaginian, Byzantine, Greek, Arab, Norman, Swabian and Spanish masters. Due to this past, to the cultural exchange that for millennia has taken place in the area, the city is still an exotic mixture of many cultures. Many of the monuments still exist giving the city a somewhat unique appearance.
The city of Palermo, including the province of Palermo, has around 1,300,000 inhabitants and has about 200 km of coastline. The old town of Palermo is one of the largest in Europe, full of references to the past.
Palermo reflects the diverse history of the region in that the city contains many masterpieces from different periods, including Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and baroque architecture as well as examples of modern art.
The city also boasts a rich vegetation of palm trees, prickly pears, bananas, lemon trees and other tropical verdure. The abundance of exotic flora was noted by the German writer Goethe who in April 1787 visited the newly opened botanical gardens, describing them as "the most beautiful place on earth".
Over 2,700 years old, the city was founded by the Phoenicians, but named by the Ancient Greeks as Panormus meaning 'the largest port of all'. Palermo became part of the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and eventually part of the Byzantine Empire, for over a thousand years. From 827 to 1071 it was under Arab rule during the Emirate of Sicily when it first became a capital.
Following the Norman reconquest, Palermo became capital of a new kingdom (from 1130 to 1816), the Kingdom of Sicily. Eventually it would be united with the Kingdom of Naples to form the Two Sicilies until the Italian unification of 1860.
It is Sicily's cultural, economic and touristic capital. Numerous tourists are attracted to the city for its good Mediterranean weather, its renowned gastronomy and restaurants, its Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque churches, palaces and buildings, and its nightlife and music. Palermo is the main Sicilian industrial and commercial center, the mains sectors being tourism, services, commerce and agriculture.
For cultural, artistic and economic reasons, Palermo was always one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean and is now among the top tourist destinations in both Italy and Europe.
A Sunday Times of London travel guide about Palermo last year began with these paragraphs:
What are we going to do about Palermo? Italian politicians are always asking this question. Because the Sicilian capital has long been a byword for corruption, vice and decadence – although the coffee’s quite fabulous.
So what do you do about Palermo? The answer is, you sit back and enjoy it – because this magnificently chaotic, sumptuously ancient city is one of southern Europe’s greatest spectacles.
In few other places can you find such heady flavours, jumbled so close together: the palazzi of medieval princes inhabited by families of paupers, catacombs full of corpses underneath restaurants full of billionaires.
In the old town, grandiose Baroque churches such as the Chiesa del Gesù gaze serenely over 1,000-year-old working-class quarters including the Albergheria; not far away, Rococo fountains splash in the shadow of palaces dating from Muslim times.
And the whole of it is set on a sparkling blue bay, under the noble Sicilian sun, next to one of the most high-fashion beaches in Europe: the Mondello.
That said, you still have to tread a little carefully. Millions might have been poured into Palermo – and many of the worst slumlands improved – but at night the dingiest corners maintain a soupçon of menace. And the Mafia, they say, still collect their ‘dues’ for ‘protection’.
But unless you want to set up a pizzeria in the middle of the barrios you won’t encounter this unsavouriness. What you will discover is a city of princes, a gangsters’ paradise, and the peerless capital of a flamboyant forgotten civilisation: Islamo-Norman Sicily. However you savour it, Palermo, like its coffee, is pretty perfetto.
The Pope in Palermo:
In memory of those who fell
at the hands of the Mafia
by Salvatore Izzo
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VATICAN CITY, Oct. 2 (Translated from AGI) - The sacrifice of Don Pino Puglisi, killed by the Mafia on September 15, 1993, and of judge Rosario Livatino, killed on Sept. 21, 1990, for both of whom the process of beatification is under way, and of the judges Falcone and Borsellini massacred with their escorts, and before them, the judges La Torre, Saetta, Costa, the police prefect Della Chiesa and the policeman Boris Giuliano....
And the heartfelt cry from John Paul II in Agrigento on May 9, 1993, to the men of the Mafia: "In the name of Christ, crucified and risen, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, repent! One day, the judgment of God will come".
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had all this in mind when on March 14, 2000, he met in Palermo with theology students and answered their questions.
In his turn, he denounced "a new paganism which, in wanting to shelve God definitively, has ended up getting rid of men". In his answers, he evoked "temptations, sufferings, persecutions". But the Church, he said, "will remain nonetheless a source of life amd joy, a reason for hope".
"The Pope's visit will give everyone an impulse to reawaken a strong sense of responsibility" and will serve as "encouragement to look forward with hope and with the will to recover", said Mons. Mariano Crociata, emeritus bishop of Noto in Siciliy, now secretary general of the Italian bishops' conference, when interviewed on the expectations of the Church in Sicily from the Pope's visit to Palermo tomorrow.
He expcts the Pope to address himself above all "to the young people and to families who are so often tempted to pessimism and discouragement".
"We expect," said Archbishop Paolo Romeo of Palermo, "to hear words of hope. In the past three years, the Sicilian bishops have sought to focus their commitment on pastoral work for the family and for young people. For this, we have held regional and diocesan conferences. And so we thought of concluding the triennial with a conference of young people and families from all the churches in Sicily (18 dioceses). So, at the start of 2009, we decided to ask the Pope to come here and crown this stage of our work and to give us new encouragement for future work".
The churches in Sicily, working with young people and families, have undertaken concrete projects in five sectors: school and university, work, justice and the law, environment, and active citizenship.
Thus," said Mons. Romeo, "the Pope is coming for them, to accept the fruit of their work so far, and to inspire them to a new challenge in the field of education".
The cnetral moment of the Pope's visit will be the Mass on the meadow in the Foro Italico, followed by the Angelus. A hundred thousand faithful are expected for the Mass to be concelebrated by the Pope with 32 cardinals and bishops and 700 priests.
Also participating are 100 deacons, 250 members of the schola cantorum, 1,000 choristers from the lay faithful, 300 extraordinary ministers to assist at communion, and 2.000 volunteers.
Some 15,000 Sicilian youth will gather in the afternoon to hear the Pope at Piazza Politeama representing some 100 associations and movements.
Among the most active, the scouts of AGESCI - one of them will present to the Pope the awareness campaign against motorcycle thieves, one of 18 young people who will join the Pope onstage to express symbolically the affection and expectations of Sicilian youth.
In a message, the Bishop of Piazza Armerina, Mons, Michele Pennisi wrote, "Pope Benedict dares young people to ask themselves about the meaning of life and on the possibilities of finding answers to their urgent questions on truth, goodness, happiness and justice which are in the hearts of all men, through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ in the Church".
"He inspires young people and families to open themselves to Christian hope and urges them to responsible Christian witness in all fields of life".
It is in this context, the prelate says, that one finds "rejection of every compromise by the Christian community with the Mafia, a rejection sealed by the martyrdom of Don Puglisi, who was killed simply because he was faithful to his ministry".
Mons. Mario Russotto, bishop of Caltanissetta, adds that "young people ask not to be alone as they face the challenges of life" and also want "to recover confidence in the Church".
Russotto, who is the responsible official in the Sicilian bishops' conference for pastoral work with famlies and with young people, says that "We must nourish in them a desire for the future". He notes that "our consumer society, and even our institutions, often speak aobut the youth without ever speaking to them, and without letting them speak".
"In addition." he says, "we must educate the young to take work initiatives, not to be content with carrying the bags for this or that politician or simply think of work as doing something behind a desk".
"They should also wean themselves away from every compromise that depends on assistance and welfare. They should learn to build a civilization of lofe, a new free society founded on faith and on solidarity".
At 5 p.m., Papa Ratzinger will meet with priests, religious and seminarians at the Cathedral of Palermo on the theme of vocations.
The rector of the Archidocesan Major Seminary of Palermo, Mons. Raffaele Mangano, will speak about a recovery of vocations in the last few years in the seminaries of Sicily. In Palermo, the seminary has 35 seminarians, with 12 more who started this year.
Earlier, the Pope will have lunched at the Archbishop's Palace with all the bishops of Sicily. The menu includes eggplant antipasto with chickpea fritters, pasta with eggplant stuffing, and seafood risotto. Dessert will be almond cakes and ricotta ice cream.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/10/2010 02:19]