The injuries of the Romanies” “

While the 5th World Congress of the pastoral care of nomads on “Church and gipsies, a spirituality of communion (cf. SirEurope nos 39, 43 and 47/2002) is in progress in Budapest (30 June-7 July), we present some “thoughts” and information on the world of nomads in Europe. “ The healing of memory: the Romanies and the Churches of Northern Europe” was the theme of a meeting held on the sidelines of the 12th Assembly of the Conference of European Churches (KEK), which ended at Trondheim, in Norway, on 2 July. “The Romanies – it was pointed out at the meeting coordinated by Doris Peschke, of the KEK Commission for Migrants in Europe (CME) – have been marginalized, and obliged to abandon their identity and culture. Their women have been sterilized, their children removed from them, without forgetting the thousands killed in concentration camps. These are actions to which the Churches responded in silence and in which they sometimes participated.” To remedy all this, “even if belatedly”, a process of reconciliation has been begun “especially on the part of the Governments and the Churches of Northern Europe, by working to improve human rights and also by inserting Romany culture in liturgies”. The Romanies too are involved in this process, as their representatives affirmed in a Declaration presented to the meeting. “The process of reconciliation is not easy – says the document – and requires patience and respect. The memory of the past, the sufferings undergone and the breaking down of prejudices are important for being able to live amicably together, without barriers”. The document, lastly, appeals to the Churches to pledge to eliminate “forms of discrimination in education, healthcare and social life” and hopes for “the creation of a theological institute for Romanies or their integration in the existing institutes”. “The gitanes are a very religious people who have a need to be understood”, says Father Ignasi Marquès, director of the Secretariat for gitane pastoral care in the archdiocese of Barcelona, one of the Spanish delegates at the congress in Budapest. In Spain there are some 600,000 gitanes ( gitanos); they mainly live in Catalonia, Castille, Galicia, Andalusia and Extremadura. “But today a crisis is taking place among them – he says –, and especially among the young, who have to some extent lost the values of their parents, thus remaining without the necessary roots to withstand the materialist temptations of contemporary society”. Describing their way of living the faith, don Marquès points out that “it is a mistake to propose too intellectual a faith to them; they have a need to embody and express their religious sense with symbolic gestures”. “They have almost all been forced to adopt a sedentary life – he explains –, because during the Franco regime they were prohibited to lead the nomadic life that runs in their blood”. According to Marquès, “Spanish society does not have a positive influence on the gitanes” who often “fall into the materialist trap, losing sight of the essential aspects of their own identity: respect for the elderly and for children, respect for the family and the clan, the joy of living in peace”. At the pastoral level, on the other hand, “the main problem is the lack of priests, male and female religious who dedicate themselves to their gipsy brothers. But we are trying to increase the number of gitane lay pastoral workers who work in the parishes”. “Gens cingara”, branded with the infamous mark of the expulsion from Eden and forced to pilgrimage throughout the world without cease: that’s how the gipsies have been represented for centuries. A recent book on the history of the gipsies is called (in Italian) The Son of Abel – 1565/1665 – a Hundred Years in the history of the gipsies in Italy, edited by Paolo Carlo Stasolla and published in Quaderno no.42 of the Fondazione Migrantes (a foundation run by the Italian Episcopal Conference). It throws new light on those who tried to foster relations with the gens cingara, thus anticipating by some two centuries the missionary involvement in the nomads, which began, according to the historians, around 1700. The research embodied in the publication bears witness to some pastoral approaches, such as that of the Jesuit Father Brancaccio, who devoted himself to the social and political dimension of the Neapolitan gipsies in the Vice-Regency of Naples from 1627 on. He persuaded them, among other things, to appoint their own representative, and gave them a surname.