Mercy and HOPE
A new column to explore some world issues in light of the Jubilee, declining the word “mercy”
I step out of the darkness of the movie theater and look up at the stars on a cold winter evening.
I think that L’abbaglio, the film directed by Roberto Andò and starring Toni Servillo, Ficarra and Picone, is an original and very timely reading of our little history. Once he has landed in Sicily at the head of the famous “Thousand,” General Garibaldi fears that the young islanders will not understand his military attempt to bring a revolution to their lives and especially to all of Southern Italy.
Not surprisingly, Colonel Orsini, played by a great Toni Servillo, says lapidarily in the film to his attendant, “The Sicilians have lost all hope of being able to change the course of history, Ragusìn. They no longer believe in anything, not even in the illusions that move the world, and this is because every time they have tried to improve their condition, their attempts have been stifled in blood by those who dominate them, the most corrupt and ignorant aristocracy in Europe.”
Garibaldi knows that he needs local forces, especially young people, to be included in his liberation and unification movement, otherwise it will be a sure defeat.
Today, with director Andò, we can affirm that the aspirations of those who followed The General were almost a “blunder,” a hope thwarted by the desire to normalize whatever shake-up comes on the Italic boot.
And is there still room for hope among our youth?
The writer Alessandro D’Avenia has made it his sort of mission to overturn paradigms regarding the construction of the new generation. There is a statement of his that I love very much; the boy must be asked what you want to do “of” growing up and not “by” growing up.
Perhaps we have stopped, after millennia, giving care to the forming generations. We probably fear their potential and merely put the screws on those who should carry on the world after us, or rather, replace us in carrying on the world. Except then, to place on their poor shoulders the heavy burden of the disasters we have wrought.
Lately I have been reading about how teenagers want to hide in the crowd so as not to face challenges that seem insurmountable to them. In the crowd one feels protected and undetectable. Evidently, we adults know how to stretch out our finger to point, identify the culprit, not accompany the path of growth.
A strange but real reading. The strangeness also stems from the fact that our young people sail more toward “the self” than toward “the we,” so the mass is not the critical mass of the late 1960s-1970s, which brought so much pain with its over-politicization. On the contrary, the digital environment leads to a rupture with the external environment, so much so that one in three young people today do not physically meet their peers after school hours. They often lock themselves indoors with their technological devices.
On Feb. 3, 2025, in Last Stand, the column he edits for Corriere della Sera, D’Avenia himself says that, in a public meeting with high school students, all the questions he received from the speakers in attendance centered on fear: “We didn’t touch on the trepidation of those who inaugurate, explore, take risks, but on the anxiety of making mistakes, a two-jawed grip that crushes what is proper to the adolescent: creative energy. “Money or passion?” A question that betrays the inner split of an entire culture in which being and doing do not speak to each other. Work from translation of being into doing is reduced to condemnation to obtain the indispensable for success: money.”
If there is a common thread that ideally unites the end-of-year messages of President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, it is to be found in the support of our children and grandchildren.
In fact, even in the one of last December 31 we read, “Young people are the great resource of our country.We can count on their enthusiasm, their creative force, the generosity they often manifest.We have a duty to listen to their unease, to give concrete answers to their needs, to their aspirations.”
Not only that, he goes on to point to diseases in the system that we will be bequeathing unless there is a swift and sure change of direction: “The precariousness and uncertainty felt by the younger generations must be addressed with great commitment, not least because therein lies a significant cause of the birth crisis we are experiencing.
In my opinion, the space for hope is there, it is also very large, but the path leading to its support is paved with trust, care, freedom (real, not the one of going home at any time of the day or night), investment, example.
Let’s start here; the path will open up as we go.
Francesco Di Sibio
Head of Social Communications Office
Archdiocese of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi-Conza-Nusco-Bisaccia
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