Napoli. ”We have the duty to bury those remains with dignity because they are stories of sacrifice. We have the duty to give answers asking for justice and mercy for those we have not been able to protect in the sleep of death.
Those remains are the memory of our past, those tombs are not monuments left to time, but are the presence of great and small, of men and women who still today tell us of the love they had for their families".
These are the words pronounced by the Archbishop of Naples, Monsignor Domenico Battaglia, in a passage of the homily for the celebration of the deceased which took place in the church of the Poggioreale cemetery.
"We cannot forget what happened - he continued - we cannot keep quiet about the consequences it had and we cannot cover up the responsibilities. Closeness lies precisely in seeking the truth and defending it, in promoting mutual collaboration in which brotherhood is felt in welcoming the needs of those who have had a double loss: death and the destruction of mortal remains.
United by the same pain we seek justice, so that a similar situation never happens again. We need – he added – to create safe places where we can cry without fear of collapses, we need to give dignity to the graves, to all the graves”.
During the homily, Monsignor Battaglia also highlighted that "what happened in the cemetery of Poggioreale makes us discover our nakedness, the poverty of the human being, it also makes us discover our being brothers to each other. When unpleasant situations happen, we realize that we need to take care of each other and then burying the dead is not only about the religious piety of a people, but the civil sense of being together".
Battaglia called on "everyone to take responsibility for burying the dead because they belong to us" and stressed that we must "take care of our deceased, of all the deceased, even those whose names we do not know: this is called respect for all that is life from its birth to its sunset and respect is the figure of the civilization of a people, it is the highest degree of spiritual life for those who turn to the God of the living and respect - he concluded - recalls not only the dignity of those who have died, but also that of families united by the same pain. They are not just bones without names: those remains refer to stories, to faces".
Article published on November 2, 2022 - 15:09
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