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The fiftieth Social Week has changed its heading: no longer “of Italian Catholics,” but “of Catholics in Italy.” This is not a nominalistic change: it means recognizing that the population living in the country is not only composed of Italian citizens, but of a multi-ethnic humanity, with about 5.3 million foreign residents, and increasingly mixed, due to mixed marriages, naturalizations, new generations growing up in Italy (872,000 students in schools). The Catholic Church in Italy has also taken on a more articulated and less predictable sociographic profile: not only because of the presence of religious men and women and priests who come from afar, but also because of an increasingly deep-rooted component of Catholics with immigrant origins, estimated at about 830,000 (Idos 2023 dossier). A social week dedicated to the issue of democratic participation cannot fail to question the expansion of the boundaries of the community of participants: how to promote the protagonism of those who find themselves legally excluded from exercising the right to vote. What is at stake is clearly a law on citizenship that looks to the past, to the Italy of emigrants, rather than building the Italy of the future.
Fortunately, however, democratic participation does not coincide with the right to vote. Both citizens in their own right, and even more so those who are not, have other channels to express their voice. One, widely used by immigrants, is union participation. There are more than a million immigrants registered with a workers’ organization. Many to obtain legal protection and support in the intricate bureaucratic procedures to which they are subjected, but increasingly also by accessing the roles of local and national trade union delegates and leaders. This is especially true in the sectors where the presence of immigrant workers is most concentrated (about 2.5 million, over 10% of total employment): construction, agro-industry, private services.
Another participatory channel is the associative one: people individually excluded from voting can organize themselves collectively in associations and movements, acquiring the possibility of interacting with local administrations, political representatives, mass-media, other subjects of civil society. Thus being able to express questions, solicit initiatives, formulate proposals, collaborate with institutions. Let’s think, for example, of the initiatives of immigrant associations during the pandemic, the awareness-raising and mediation activities they have carried out, the collections with which they have raised money for Italian hospitals and municipalities, with surprising generosity (Medì-CSVnet study center). But, just as this mobilization was soon forgotten, in general in Italy immigrant associations still receive little recognition and support. It encounters an invisible barrier that we should question.
Finally, we should ask ourselves how much voice immigrants have within the Italian Catholic Church, not only as beneficiaries of numerous and widespread support actions, but as active protagonists of the ecclesial structure. Here a dichotomy occurs: Catholic immigrants are very active in their communities, ethnic, national, and linguistic, while they are rarely seen in parish and diocesan communities. Sometimes movements manage to attract some, but that’s not the rule. Hybridization in the ecclesial sphere has not yet established itself.
The great democratic enterprise “of widening the tent stakes” (Cardinal Martini) of participation is therefore articulated on different levels: that of legal citizenship, that of social participation, that of ecclesial protagonism. Above all, we need new sensitivities and new initiatives.