At least 124,000 migrants entered Italy in the first eight months of this year, more than twice the 60,000 who arrived in all of 2013. The vast majority landed first in Sicily. Seeing to the new arrivals’ immediate needs in Sicily’s multiple port cities is now a joint effort between church and civil society. In January, the Palermo branch of Caritas signed a convention with city authorities to open four centers for migrants, known as extraordinary welcome centers, which currently house 160 people. When groups of migrants suddenly arrive, Caritas volunteers greet their boats with food, clothes and medical help. In an emergency, Palermo churches remove pews and install cots, provided by the city, for stays of as long as a week. In Catania, the Caritas Help Center stayed open the whole summer to provide food, shelter and clothing to some 400 migrants and other homeless people. “The poor don’t go away on vacation,” the Rev. Piero Galvano, director of Caritas in Catania, told BlogSicilia, an online publication, in July. “Migrants deserve being treated with dignity and respect. Tending to them is a sign of civilization.”
Landing in Sicily
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Athletes who never make mistakes, who never lose, do not exist. Champions are not perfectly functioning machines, but real men and women, who, when they fall, find the courage to get back on their feet.
In his video message at White Sox stadium, Pope Leo encouraged young people to look inside themselves, recognize God’s presence in their own hearts and “recognize that God is present and that, perhaps in many different ways, God is reaching out to you,
The June 14 celebration featured the first-ever airing of Pope Leo XIV’s video message to the world’s youth at the White Sox stadium in Chicago’s Southside.
Pope Leo called for a “commitment to build a world that is safer and free from the nuclear threat.”