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What Does not Collapse

Fr Ulisse, the parish priest of San Giuliano di Puglia, speaks out. His cell phone never stops ringing. So many want to help or to make a contribution. “After the experience of these days, we have to be capable also of rethinking charity, which must be humble, discreet, hidden.” The concrete companionship of some friends

By PAOLO BIONDI

Rita Lorenzetti, President of the Region of Umbria, tells me that among the first to arrive in Molise were volunteers from the Civil Protection Agency of Umbria. When I arrived in Irpinia [an area of Italy devastated by an earthquake in 1980] at the end of November 1980, I met rescue workers from Tarcento and Gemona, the towns struck by the earthquake in Friuli. As soon as I reached San Giuliano di Puglia, I heard the rough Tuscan accents of the Misericordie [the Tuscan Brotherhood of Mercy, dating to the Middle Ages], just like in Umbria and in Irpinia. The historical earthquake map of Italy is a map of solidarity and charity.

It is odd that the map uniting these towns forsaken by God is also a map of the hand of God, the hand of God resting on man’s shoulder. Because, as St Thérèse of Lisiex said, “When I am charitable, it is Christ working in me.”

“I have a vague impression that there is a form of charity lopsided in the direction of assistance. During these days, we have seen so much welcome charity, but also some tainted by protagonism. After the experience of these days, we have to be capable also of rethinking charity, which must be humble, discreet, hidden.” Fr Ulisse Marinucci is 30 years old. Despite his young age, he has experience enough for two people, the experience that comes from one of those crash courses in which life sometimes enrolls you without your asking, without your having to fill out application forms. “Six hundred cans of oil for chain saws, can you imagine?!” he adds, somewhere between amused and irritated, as he comments on the latest package that has arrived. “Not even if we were in Alaska.”

“Ulisse, what do you need?”
Fr Ulisse was not appointed parish priest of San Giuliano di Puglia strange name for a little town in Molise that looks at Apulia, or rather Daunia, from the top of its hill, beyond the Fortore Valley, toward the noonday sun); he was directly appointed the earthquake priest. He arrived in San Giuliano on October 20th. As often happens to a young priest arriving among his people, he just had time to meet the children and some of their mothers. He still didn’t know all their names when the dull thud of the quaking earth took a handful of them away, little blooms drooping down in the midst of a bouquet of wildflowers.

Fr Ulisse hasn’t even had time to figure out who is still his parishioner and who no longer is. He knows that there is a cell phone that has been ringing uninterruptedly since 11:30 a.m. on that fateful October 31st, he knows that every day a pack of mail arrives that not even the President of Italy receives, he knows that there is a line of people making requests, and that he has to go to those who don’t even know what to request; he knows too that he himself doesn’t even know where to begin.

When, the day after the earthquake, among the countless phone calls, one came from friends in his old parish in Guglionesi–“Ulisse, what do you need?”–he didn’t know what to answer. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe children’s stuff.” The friends in Guglionesi had a supermarket opened for them–it was November 1st, and, because of the holiday and the fear of earthquakes, everything was closed. “We had them give us diapers, handkerchiefs, paper tissues, and baby food, and we set out,” recounts Nicola Sorella, a high school Italian teacher who lives in Guglionesi with his wife and son. Amidst the rubble, once again came the same question, “Ulisse, what do you need?”

Friends in the tent
“I didn’t even know myself what to answer,” says the earthquake priest. “Also because he had no time to talk with us,” Nicola adds. “The phone kept ringing… everyone who arrived there looked for him, he who could not carry out his priestly tasks We said to him, ‘We’ll act as your secretaries, so that, you know, for example, that you can say Mass on a certain schedule.’ I didn’t have school, since it was closed because of the earthquake. I came to San Giuliano with Fabio.” This was Fabio Filippone (another of the group of CL friends whom Fr Ulisse had known in the Guglionesi parish), 26 years old, a house-painter who was out of work too because of the earthquake. He had been painting Fr Ulisse’s future home, an apartment where the priest was supposed to live with another priest. “In reality, they didn’t call me to find out what I wanted, they captured me. What they were offering seemed indispensable to me, if I wanted to be a priest even a little,” says Fr Ulisse, adding, “Above all, they are not secretaries, but friends, and this changes everything. In the first place, they don’t make me feel uncomfortable at having a secretary; then, I can have the luxury of living an experience with them. I don’t need somebody just to carry my briefcase. People see that in this tent there is not only the church, but also a group of friends, and so they come in even solely out of curiosity.”

No protagonism
Right, but what is charity here, the charity that should not be mere relief distribution tainted by protagonism? “It is a matter of bringing a community back to life, a community that was already falling apart even before the earthquake,” Ulisse says. And Nicola explains, “As soon as the tent city was set up, the only one who started working immediately was San Giuliano’s barber.” In effect, as soon as I passed through the gate of the sports field where the first tent city was set up, I had seen the shelter sent by the Ministry of the Interior, with a newspaper vendor, a cigarette vendor, and the handwritten sign on the door: Barber. Beyond the tent is a chair with a white towel draped over the back. “He is the first and only one who has resumed work. Thus, when a CL friend who is a barber called us to say, ‘I’m coming Monday; I can give people shaves and cut hair,’ we told him, ‘For heaven’s sake, stay where you are,’” Nicola says. Charity is also telling a volunteer to stay home. “Charity has to be intelligent. Here everyone wants to come animate somebody. The risk is having one animator per person and nobody to animate, because here there is no more work, there is no more life,” says Ulisse.

The telephone, in the meantime, keeps ringing. Nicola answers a lawyer from Como who wants to know the bank account number so he can make a contribution. Besides Nicola and Fabio, Delfo, who works for the Region, and Lino, a literature teacher in a teachers’ training school, also came, and today there are some GS students, too, all of them from Guglionesi. The mail comes; there are letters with checks (today, six arrived) and others with cash, making today’s total e10,489. Fr Ulisse shakes his head: “People don’t trust the institutions, they want to give directly to me, but it is a perverse and mistaken mechanism. The diocesan center of Caritas surely has its finger on the pulse of the situation better than I do.” Among the letters, you find everything–lots of crazies, but not only: “I was an elementary school teacher,” or simply “a friend,” “I am an inmate in the San Gimignano prison”… then children, lots of children, elementary school children, who only know how to draw, houses with lots of windows such as have never been seen in San Giuliano, blue skies, flowers, many hugs, and poems.

The children of San Giuliano
Fernando, one of the children who survived the collapse of the school, comes into the tent. He is out of the hospital and has a nice white cast on his arm, to have the priest sign in the middle of countless other signatures. Outside, Giovanni goes past in his wheelchair. He has a crushed foot, but he was the first to emerge from under the nightmare; he came out by himself, making his way through the rubble of the school toward that light of salvation he could glimpse. Now he has something to say to everybody and whisks up and down the field in his wheelchair. His father is a surveyor, Umberto Persichillo, who helps Nicola, Fabio, Lino, and Delfo take inventory of the various economic enterprises of the 1,150 inhabitants of the town: a handful of essential businesses (the grocery store, the coffee shop…), some professionals (the surveyor, the engineer, the medical doctor), farmers, and 200 masons divided among a dozen or so construction companies, traveling around Italy for work, when there is work.

AVSI [CL’s Association for Volunteers in International Service] has launched an “Emergency Project for Molise” to reactivate existing businesses, so that people can stay close by where they will be able to rebuild their houses, without accelerating the process of emigration.

“As I was doing this survey of businesses, Giovanni, the traveling fruit and vegetables vendor, called me. He returned to San Giuliano three months ago, after a life as an emigrant in Germany. He told us that he wants to help in our reconnaissance of businesses, not only here, but also in a dozen other towns,” Nicola says. And in those dozen towns, a new map of solidarity is taking shape. This solidarity, when it is charity, is the hand of God resting on man’s shoulder.