The daughter of Herodias feels nothing and, at her mother’s instigation, asks for the head of John the Baptist as a reward for her dance. And when it is served to her, on a silver platter, without feeling the horror of the gesture he brings it to his mother, as if it were a fruit basket, an object, any inanimate thing.
Yesterday as today, minors are instigated, directly or indirectly, to violence by the adult world. They are not educated to feel remorse, indignation, to realize the enormity of their actions and the consequences. We also saw it on December 27th when Bruno Petrone, 18 years old, a promising young player in Campania football, ended up in hospital after having had his spleen removed, suffering several stab wounds to the abdomen. A punitive expedition, the one against him, carried out by four boys, two of whom, a fifteen year old and a seventeen year old, turned themselves in. A full-scale ambush in the Chiaia district, that of the Neapolitan Movida. A few days earlier in Milan, in the central Corso Buenos Aires, a fifteen-year-old had been kidnapped and robbed by another gang of kids without anyone in the crowded street intervening to save him.
Episodes that multiply and shed light, as he underlines the beautiful book by Adriana Gulotta and Maria Cristina Marazzi (Jesus and the children. Spiritual readings of childhood and adolescence, Morcelliana editrice) how often children involved in criminal acts «develop a morality “deformed” by mafia or criminal “principles”, which will be difficult to change over the course of their lives.
They want to feel and do great things, have the approval of adults, obtain recognition from their peers: there are many reasons that push them to enter into similar dynamics and that lead them to carry out gestures that will carry the weight of them all their lives.”
Childhood and adolescence denied. Because education in distinguishing good from evil, education in peace, and true and profound listening are denied.
By rereading the childhood of Jesus, precisely in these Christmas days, we discover how fragile the lives of the little ones are. They were at the time of Jesus, when the word indicated both the little ones and the slaves, they still are now, treated either by sovereigns whose desires are always welcomed by an adult world that does not know how to set limits and rules, or trampled by poverty, by wars. In the text, which can be read in one go and seems to be the work of a single hand, so intertwined are the Scriptures with the analysis of reality, we encounter children without childhood, invisible, non-existent, who can even become dangerous for themselves and others. Incapable of standing on their own because no one taught them, as Joseph did with Jesus, to “read” themselves within a story, to feel part of a family, to cultivate memories and dreams.
And so, while sociologists and criminologists struggle to understand which way to go, while politics calls for increasingly severe laws, while we move towards “medicalization” without a real cure (how many attention disorders or deficits are diagnosed?), it is worth stopping under the tree, in the days that separate us from the Epiphany, and listening to Adriana Gulotta and Maria Cristina Marazzi, teacher and doctor, both involved with the Community of Sant’Egidio. To resume look at children and young people with the eyes of Jesus. To put them back at the center of our action, of our listening, to enhance their talent, to take them seriously and help them, as the Community peace schools and schooling programs do, to recognize values and obligations, to orient themselves, to develop not the desires of “sovereign children”, never the dreams of those who can achieve great things.
