Exactly one year after the opening of the Holy Door and the beginning of the 2025 Jubilee proclaimed by Pope Francis, the documentary film by Simona Cocozza is broadcast on RAI3 at 11.25pm The Women’s Jubilee. The story, entirely written by women, was born from an extraordinary experience created and lived by the Archdiocese of Naples. Barbara Petrillo hosts
THE HISTORY
In mid-2024 the bishop (now cardinal) Don Mimmo Battaglia decides to launch religious-tourist routes to highlight the female role in the faith and history of the city. The task of organizing and coordinating the succession of events is entrusted to Adriana Valeriohistorian and theologian, former professor of history of Christianity and the Churches at the Federico II University of Naples. From here the documentary was born which aims to decode the complexity of Naples, a city suspended between devotion and earthly life, through the gaze of its protagonists.
Naples is perhaps the only city born from a woman. The mermaid Parthenope lands on its shores and dies, to whom popular legend assigns two different motivations: either disillusioned in love with Ulysses or vainly trying to rescue her friend Proserpina from the hands of her kidnapper Pluto.
In short, a woman who loves, creates, defends and cares. It is perhaps due to this initial imprinting that the long history of Naples is constantly intertwined with a succession of large and at the same time “small” female figures who actively deal with the living and the dead, with the present and with memory. In Naples the path of the “feminine” closely intersects with that of a religious faith lived totally as an active and conscious service. In Naples even the choice of seclusion is presented and experienced as aimed at the world, as an instrument for the common good.
Over the centuries, thanks to the tireless female presence and its close relationship with the Christian faith, the city has experienced a series of experiences that still qualify it and present it throughout the world: from Le Lazzarelle, which organizes and helps ex-prisoners return to the world, to the Incurable Hospitalabsolute synthesis of the right to care even in the absence of hope, to the active and creative maintenance of the relationship with those who are no longer among us, to the only Italian university named after a woman, Sister Orsola Benincasa.
