2020, the year of the advent of the pandemic, brought grief but also misery, with an incidence of poverty that grew by 2.2 percentage points : an increase that, with the exception of the increase recorded in the South, is higher to national data.
More than sixteen out of a hundred families in our region, exactly 110 thousand , live below the poverty line. Families who are unable to make it to the end of the month, because without a salary they can count on (51.2%), or with the only support of a precarious and poorly paid job. A poverty that obviously also affects minors, tens of thousands of children and adolescents who - today more than ever - have a very high probability (six out of ten) of not improving their condition and not being able to get on the social elevator .
These are some of the data from the 2022 Report of the regional Caritas presented yesterday in Cagliari in the Benedict XVI room of the archiepiscopal seminary. Data relating to all the dioceses of the island, numbers and stories that tell a condition of hardship that has grown with Covid and gangrened by dear-life and high-energy . Ten thousand people who in 2020 asked for help from Caritas. “Above all women, mothers of families”, explained Raffaele Callia, regional delegate and head of the Caritas Studies and Research Service. "In 2021, however, the requests for help from men and women are the same". Average age 48 years , therefore people of working age, and who do not have a job, or it is poorly paid.
The numbers of poverty, also elaborated on the basis of Istat data, only partially tell the reality. “The poor are not only those who ask for help”, explained Fr Marco Lai, director of the diocesan Caritas of Cagliari. " Those we intercepted represent only the tip of the iceberg ".
Monsignor Giuseppe Baturi, archbishop of Cagliari, recalled the true meaning of the word charity. "The first gesture of charity is knowing how to look at reality," he said. “A gesture that challenges freedom. Charity is letting oneself be wounded by the cry of one's brothers. The Church's task is to get closer to men, knowing how to propose a path of redemption; seeing the need and knowing how to deal with it in view of a path of growth ".
