Female migrants who were being hosted at an Italian government CAS reception center in Torrenova, on the eastern outskirts of Rome, will be transferred. The government has closed the center, and the nuns who were providing assistance to the women are protesting against the closure.
The CAS migrant reception center for women in Torrenova on the eastern outskirts of Rome has been closed. A group of nuns who were providing assistance there are protesting against the closure. The nuns wrote a letter to Marco Tarquinio, editor of the Catholic daily Avvenire, which Tarquinio published in the paper on Wednesday.
In response to the letter, Tarquinio wrote: "Your pain and dismay is ours; they are tearing down reception that was working in a war of solidarity. It's a human disaster, a civil shame." The nuns wrote that they wanted to show an "initial sign of support to the many sisters that we have met during our period of service at the CAS in Torrenova," The center at Torrenova took in female migrants and is situated on the eastern outskirts of Rome. The nuns noted that "the young women were put on buses and sent to unknown destinations, perhaps to one of the other centers spread through Italy, which one after another are closing their doors," they laid the blame for these closures at the feet of the government's new law which came into force in Autumn 2018.
The nuns began working at the CAS on August 1, providing a reception service to the young migrants as well as "mini courses to [provide] humanity, dignity, and serenity", the nuns wrote. "We were strongly affected by the way the closure of the structure took place, with very little warning and little information about the future of the young women involved," they wrote. In their letter, they asked whether the way migration policy is being conducted in Italy is "setting a bad example" because in their view, it encapsulates "an approach to people that is disrespectful of human rights, and not up to the values of our country, Italy."
'Policy doesn't solve problems, it creates new ones'
Tarquinio, in his response to the letter, said that the "scandalous heart of this policy is that it doesn't solve any problems, but it creates new ones." He felt that "this increases the suffering of the fragile people involved, it humiliates the men and women who are professionally and voluntarily working for a type of reception that was better regulated and truly functioning."
Tarquinio thinks that the problems are also growing "through a strange mix of (hateful) propaganda and (cynical) silence about what is happening," he felt that public opinion was being "intoxicated." He went on making a pun to highlight, in his opinion the ineffectiveness of current policy. "These same gentlemen are those who periodically throw around the idea of reopening brothels ('case chiuse')." He concluded that the victims are always the vulnerable and, "as in this case, women."