ROMA – Absolute poverty in Italy affects almost 5.7 million people, almost a tenth of the population. There Italian Caritas presented the 2024 Report on poverty and social exclusion, now in its twenty-eighth edition and launched on the occasion of World Day of the Poor on Sunday 17 November 2024. The title is “Blades of grass in the cracks. Answers of hope”.
Poor and intermittent work is rampant. From the analysis of Caritas data it emerges that poor and intermittent work is rampant, with low wages and atypical contracts that prevent a dignified life. Young people and families with children are the most vulnerable groups. Housing hardship represents an emergency, with families without homes or in inadequate housing conditions. Access to education and new technologies becomes a mirage for increasingly larger segments of the population, fueling inequalities.
I found it at Caritas. The people accompanied in 2023 by Caritas services (online with data collection) were 269,689. From 2015 to today their number has grown by 41.6%. Chronic and intermittent poverty increases: from 54.7% to 59%. Psychological and psychiatric distress is growing among those who turn to Caritas: from 2022 to 2023 the number of people suffering from depression or mental illnesses increases by 15.2%. While absolute poverty continues to be at record levels, various and multifaceted phenomena of social hardship are appearing on the Italian scene. Some, Caritas claims, are long-standing but continue to strike in a particularly alarming way.
Housing: a right that has long been neglected. “Think – we read in the summary statement of the Report – of the problems related to housing, a right that has long been denied to many people and families, on multiple levels of severity. In other cases, the problems are intertwined with an incomplete or inadequate implementation of institutional responses. This is the case of the obstacles that prevent access to alternative measures to prison or the barriers that limit the use of the minimum income measures introduced in recent years. Yet – we read again – despite the critical issues that undermine our daily experience, we can glimpse in the cracks of the blades of green grass, signs of hope, the many responses, works and services put in place by the ecclesial community, by society civil society, associations and voluntary work, and who contribute with their contribution to making our lives more human and dignified”.
The people, the stories, the hope. Behind the data collected by Caritas there are people with their stories. “Through the Report – underlines Don Marco Pagniello, director of Caritas Italiana – we do not only want to offer a snapshot of poverty in Italy, but we intend to relaunch the invitation to look beyond the figures to recognize the wounded humanity that vibrates behind every number”, attempting to travel “new paths” and “unexplored roads”. “Faced with this emergency – continues Don Pagniello – Caritas Italiana chooses to be the spokesperson for a courageous and prophetic response. A reception and support network extends across the national territory: listening centres, canteens, dormitories and shelters become outposts of a Church that becomes a ‘house of charity’, open to all, without distinctions”.
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