SCALABRINI, A SAINT FOR MIGRANTS On Sunday 9 October, the apostle of workers forced to leave their homeland will be canonized in St. Peter's: John Baptist Scalabrini, the bishop who fought against misery and exploitation. "I visited populous cities and nascent communities, fields fertilized by work and immense fields not touched by the hand of man, I met emigrants who had become wealthy, others who lived in comfort, but the immense majority of migrants live in misery, fighting for their lives against the dangers of the desert, the snares of unhealthy climates, against human rapacity, alone in supreme abandonment, lacking of all religious and civil comforts and of everything; I felt hearts beat in unison with mine ... ". On Sunday morning, October 9,2022, in St. Peter’s Basilica, one hundred and seventeen years after having sent to Pope Pius X his extraordinary "Memorial for the establishment of a pontifical commission Pro emigratis catholicis" of 1905 with the story of some of his travels among the Italians scattered around the planet, John Baptist Scalabrini will become a saint. Just right now that the issue of immigration and the Italian "naval blockade" invoked by the right is back on fire? Foolish suspicions: the beatification of the bishop of Piacenza, known throughout the world for having founded the congregations of "Scalabrinian" missionaries and having been perhaps the first person to have a clear and global idea of the phenomenon of migration, was beatified in 1997 by Pope Wojtyla and already the “L'Osservatore Romano" for many years dedicated pages of admired devotion to the "Apostle of the Emigrants". But certainly Pope Francis, a son of emigrants, will experience an extraordinay emotion on Sunday. Scalabrini was, in fact, among the first to theorize, as shown by a passage in the Anthology: a living voice (scalabriniani.org/giovanni-battista-scalabrini-scritti), on the "natural right" of men to emigrate. A thesis sung at the end of the nineteenth century also by anarchists such as Francesco Bertelli ("The house belongs to those who live there / it is a coward who ignores it / time belongs to the philosophers / the land for those who work"), but perhaps never summed up with the depth and faith of Scalabrini. He spoke of "our" emigrants. He was angry with those who got in the way of the dream of "migrants" elsewhere like the poor christ crowded at the Milan station: Their faces, bronzed by the sun and furrowed by the premature wrinkles of deprivation, reflected the inner turmoil convulsing their hearts at that moment. There were old men bent with age and labor, young men in the prime of manhood, women pulling along or carrying their little ones, boys and girls, all drawn together by the same desire, all heading toward a common goal. They were emigrants. They had come from the various provinces of Northern Italy and were waiting with trepidation for the train that would take them to the shores of the Mediterranean, whence the steamer would carry them to far-off America, where they hoped to find a less hostile fate, a land less unresponsive to their labors. These poor souls were leaving, some sent for by relatives who had». He was angry with the landowners "worried by this sudden impoverishment of laborers, which translates into an adequate increase in wages for those who remain" and raised "their complaints to the government" to obtain measures "to heal and circumscribe this moral disease, this desertion, which strips the country of arms and fruiting capital ». Unacceptable requests for him. By blocking emigration "a sacred human right is violated" since "human rights are inalienable and therefore man can go to seek his well-being where more talents are available". If that were not enough, he argued, "emigration, a centrifugal force, can become, when it is well managed, a very powerful centripetal force" capable of "immense profit". Thesis that in 1901, two years after the lynching of eleven Italians in Tallulah, Louisiana, he had also expressed to Theodore Roosevelt: immigration was an extraordinary resource, a true gift for a country that was growing like the United States. Born in Fino Mornasco in 1839 into a very Catholic family, "candidate for the priesthood" from an early age, attended a seminary during the years of the Risorgimento to the point of leaving him with some difficulties, as the historian Matteo Sanfilippo wrote, in "balancing national belonging and religious belonging ", a 24-year-old priest with" the dream of going to the Indies to evangelize the infidels", but retained by the bishop of Como with the appointment as professor and vice-rector (later rector), bishop of Piacenza at 36, managed to make himself loved like few others with gestures passed to legend. Summarized in 1980 by Raimondo Manzini, in the "L’Osservatore Romano", in a few lines: "He sold the pair of horses (then we went with horses and not with motor horses) saying that the bishop can very well go on foot; he alienated the gold chalice to replace it with one made of tin or brass, he sold the stones of his cross to redeem the pawns of the pawnshop from the poor people. “If he goes on like this he will die on straw,” a family member told him. “It would not be bad”, the bishop replied, “since Christ wanted to be born on the straw” ». It goes without saying that in the suffering world of Italian emigration, Scalabrini managed to touch everyone's heart. Of course, he was not the only prominent figure among the Italian overseas missionaries. Suffice it to recall Francesca Cabrini from Lodi, indefatigable founder of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and canonized in 1946 as the first American saint, patroness of emigrants. Or the legendary Maria Rosa Segale, brought to America when she was four, who became famous as Sister Blandina in the Far West (the newspapers of the time dedicated unforgettable portraits to her) for having stopped at the entrance to the town of Trinidad, Colorado, a furious Billy the Kid determined to make a massacre. Perhaps no one, however, with his friend Geremia Bonomelli bishop of Cremona, has weighed so much in the history of italian emigration. Starting with the insistence on the need for the Italian state, distracted if not indifferent (apart from the imposition of military service), to take on the problem. And from the battle in 1888 against a bill that, we quote Manzini again, "sanctioned the concession to the so-called “emigration agents" to enlist, which meant legalizing the scourge of the so-called" merchants", who deceive agricultural and industrial workers, who were looking for bread beyond the borders of the homeland, making them paying exorbitant rates and exposing them to miserable conditions, prohibitive situations and a set of dangers». Bread which, wrote the bishop of Piacenza quoting Dante, tasted of salt and was "wet with tears". Scalabrini lost that battle. But he was right. And thirteen years later the government and Parliament were forced to reverse, admitting in the report to a new law: “We all erred in 1888 and we did not understand then that measures were needed in economic and social matters; and not only or mainly of the police: what must be sought is the inviolability of the person of the emigrant, exposed to so many offenses, to so many sufferings; up to now and too often the emigrant was the means or the instrument to enrich those who were next to him under the pretext of rendering him a service ". Words that seem to have been written yesterday morning against Libyan traffickers, the abusive landlords who pile immigrants into fetid hovels, the filthy gangsters who take advantage of men and women who, as Saint John Baptist Scalabrini would say, "are drawn (down here) by vain hopes or from false promises, they found an iliad of troubles, abandonment, hunger, and not infrequently death, where they believed they would find a paradise ».