Caritas alarm: poverty is at an all-time high

"Poverty today is at an all-time high and is to be understood as a structural phenomenon of the country". This is highlighted in the Statistical Report 'Poverty 2024' by Caritas Italy. "In 2023," the report reads, "in the listening centres and computerised services alone (3,124 in 206 dioceses in Italy) the people met and supported totalled 269,689. Almost 270,000 'faces' comparable to as many nuclei'. It is pointed out that compared to 2022 'there has been a 5.4 per cent increase in the number of assisted persons, a growth that is more moderate than a year ago', but 'the comparison of the number of assisted persons 2019-2023 is merciless: +40.7 per cent. The report also contains three focuses that shed light on the new and increasingly chronic poverty that particularly affects families with children, the homeless and the elderly.

"Attention to the poor is not only the task of Caritas and other organised organisations working for them, but of everyone," said the archbishop of Gorizia and president of Caritas Italiana, Monsignor Carlo Roberto Maria Redaelli, speaking at the presentation of the Report. And "it is important to meet people in need in order to enter into a relationship, to listen to them in order to help them".

"Poverty has become chronic, and therefore all the more reason for an extraordinary commitment because there is so much poverty and exclusion has increased, inequality has increased, and so many are on the threshold of poverty," said the president of the Italian Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, commenting on the poverty data that emerged from the Caritas Report. For the cardinal, "there is a need for great commitment from everyone, the Church will naturally do its part to be close and also to try to remove the causes, to reopen many possibilities for study, integration, preparing the future, welcoming". He recalled that with poor work one does not make ends meet.

Among those received by the Caritas network, the incidence of foreigners drops to 57.0% (from 59.6%), also due to the decrease in the number of Ukrainians in our country. In 2023, the share of new arrivals drops from 45.3% to 41%. On the other hand, intermittent and chronic poverty is on the rise, which particularly concerns those households that oscillate between 'in- and out-of-need' conditions or that have been in a state of vulnerability for a long time: one person out of four has in fact been accompanied for five years or more. "A hard core of poverty seems to persist," reads the report, "which drags on from year to year without any particular shake-up.

And it is poverty alert for families with children. The report recalls that 'one in seven children in the 0-3 age group is poor in absolute terms'. "In the first years of life," write the authors of the dossier, "cognitive, socio-emotional and physical skills that are essential for future life are acquired. Situations of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion severely compromise these processes, directly affecting the lives of children and, at the same time, also those of their parents, reducing their ability to protect, support and promote the development of their children. In Italy there are many households with minors in a state of poverty; in fact, they are the most disadvantaged'.