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02 February 2021
Parent Category: Iniziative (EN) -
Category: Maison de la Paix (EN)
On February 2, the inauguration ceremony of the new Archbishop of Naples took place: Monsignor Domenico Battaglia, or Don Mimmo, as he likes to be called. Don Mimmo's day - 57 years old, originally from Calabria but until 12 December bishop of the small diocese of Cerreto Sannita (just 90,000 inhabitants) - began very early with a prayer in the cloistered convent of the Sacramentine.
Then immediately after he wanted to touch and visit the city with the meeting with the relatives of a vigilantes killed, years ago, by some boys; so he wanted to hear the words of a Nigerian girl who arrived in Italy after a journey of exploitation and violence, then fell ill with AIDS. And again he was at the home of a worker at the Whirlpool plant in Naples, and in San Giovanni a Teduccio in the "Sons of Mary" association. And with some of them he wanted to enter the cathedral where his predecessor, Cardinal Sepe, was absent, because he was still recovering after Covid.
But for Battaglia the imperative, in the years that will see him at the helm of the largest diocese in the South, will have to be to reorganize the conscious hope that from today, he said during the meeting with the authorities, "a new stretch of road and my greatest desire is to be able to regain the ability to dream together "especially in a time, like that of the Covid emergency, which has" ended up increasing inequalities and with them social tensions ".
At the meeting with the authorities, in addition to the mayor of Naples, Luigi de Magistris and the governor of Campania, Vincenzo De Luca, the ministers Enzo Amendola and Gaetano Manfredi were also present. Battaglia said that "Signs that become dreams: right today here in Naples we must dream together, because if we really intend to regain possession of the dream, we know very well that it is necessary to return to reasoning in terms of ourselves, we must start again to think in the plural".
We all greatly appreciated his words full of hope and Christian values and, above all, of hostility towards Love for the Power which must transform itself into the Power of Love. We will not let him miss our presence during his pastoral journey.
