L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014 www.italoamericano.com L'Italo-Americano 3 New Saints in the Eternal City May 1st, International Workers Day: those eight hours of work a day that people fought hard for grims, local transportation was reorganized to meet the demand, and mega-screens were installed in the main squares. The celebrations started on Saturday, when all the Catholic churches in the city center remained open to the faithful for prayers and confession. Then on the Sunday of the Divine Mercy - designated as such in April 2000 by Pope John Paul II himself - the canonization of Karol Józef Wojtyła and Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli took place in St. Peter's Basilica at 10 am local time. After the Holy Mass, the atten- dees were invited to enter the Basilica and pay homage to the two Saints. Political leaders and heads of State and Government were in attendance, including Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, as well as former Pope Joseph Ratzinger. As Pope Francis recalled, Blessed John XXIII was "holy, patient, and a man of courage." He was referring in particular to the Second Vatican Council, for- mally opened by the Italian Pope in 1962, which brought about significant changes in the rela- tionship between the Roman Catholic Church and contempo- rary society. Among the institu- tional innovations introduced on that occasion were the openness to a dialogue with other religions and the use of vernacular lan- guages instead of Latin in the Holy Mass. Pope Roncalli was beatified in the year 2000 by John Paul II, "the great mission- ary of the Church", as Pope Francis has recently defined him. The first Polish Pontiff in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, Karol Wojtyla also boasted the longest papacy after those of Pius IX in the 19th cen- tury and allegedly of St. Peter. He traveled the world gathering the faithful, mainly the young generations, but also testifying to the Church's effort to connect with other faiths. After witness- ing and dealing with radical phe- nomena, such as the Cold War and globalization, he died in 2005 and was beatified in 2011 by his immediate successor Pope Benedict XVI. The decision to proclaim them Saints on the same day under- lines once again their key role in shaping the 20th century, as well as their contribution to the renewal of the Catholic Church. The canonization of Blessed John Paul II was extraordinarily fast, and was approved by Pope Francis even before the ratifica- tion of the required second mira- cle. It is not unprecedented to have it waived – the last one to do so was John XXIII himself -, and in this particular case Karol Wojtyla was already and widely recognized as a Saint by the community of the faithful. Yet in the end his second miracle was revealed: the inexplicable – from a scientific point of view - heal- ing of a Costa Rican woman who had suffered serious brain damage. As confirmed by the impres- sive turnout and by the copious demonstrations of respect and appreciation towards the two Blessed, canonization was almost a formality, the crowning moment of a life of holiness. Tens of thousands of pilgrims are gathering for the open air ceremony to canonize John Paul II and John XXIII Continued from page 1 "Eight hours of work, eight of leisure, eight of sleep" was the slogan coined in Australia in 1855 and proposed by the First International in Geneva in 1866. May 1st festivity comes from a moment of international intense fight of all workers, in asserting their rights and improve their condition, on the whole, the working time. The struggle for the eight hours saw American workers, who paid a very high price, especially committed. During the fighting in Chicago in the first days of May of 1886, known as "the revolt of Haymarket", some strikers and policemen lost their lives and a violent wave of repression, a trail of violence toward the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, started. In Europe, the socialist dele- gates of the Second International Meeting in Paris in 1889 declared May 1, International Workers' Day, with these words: "a big demon- stration will be organized for a date, so that simultaneously in all countries and in all cities, on the same day, the workers will ask the public authorities to reduce the working day to eight hours…" Thus the tradition of the first day of May began, but it was only on May 1st, 1919 that met- alworkers and other categories of Italian workers could cele- brate the achievement of the eight working hours. Fascism, deeming it subver- sive, suppressed the recurrence and replaced it with the Festa del Lavoro Italiano in coinci- dence with the founding of Rome, il Natale di Roma, which was celebrated on April 21st. Restored after the fall of Fascism, May 1st knew other moments of violence, especially the Portella della Ginestra mas- sacre in 1947, when Salvatore Giuliano and his band killed poor peasants fighting against the latifondismo. Today, May 1 st in Italy, in the profound crisis of our days, seems to have abandoned the traditional form of celebration, a day of rest and feast to return to being an occasion on which the workers's voices can be heard. The recurrence seems to have recovered themes that, at least in their urgency, it was believed to have delivered throughout histo- ry. May 1 st is not just an excuse to attend a free concert any- more, join a picnic, ride a bike or engage in talk more or less rhetorical, it means bring up subjects and topics of high importance for the old country: work that just isn't there, jobs that are missing, especially for the younger generations, insecu- rity, employment regulations that are increasingly abstract for a world of workers everyday more differentiated and crushed, in which people feel abandoned. The crisis of the Union is pre- cisely the failure of the left wing connected to it. This is a May 1 st that poses enormous problems: disputes are on fire; debates are always open but little to nowhere con- clusive, the solutions are improbable; the unions's unity is a Linus's blanket that is get- ting always shorter and shorter, perched around words that do not get the new generations excited or passionate, apart from big free concerts more or less successful and a Piazza San Giovanni more or less crowded. ELENA VIPERA

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