"Bring children close to the elderly", Pope asksCustodianship of the elderly, a "matter of honor," says Pope Francis"If we really care about the elderly, we have to listen to them."Mario Marazziti is an essayist and leader of RAI, editorialist of "Corriere della Sera" and member of the Italian National Commission of Inquiry on Social Exclusion. Historical spokesman of the Sant'Egidio Community, he is one of the coordinators of the international campaign for the abolition of capital punishment and for a better quality of life for the elderly, and was part, together with Nelson Mandela, of the mediation team that put an end to the civil war in Burundi. Marazziti was a member of the Italian Parliament, chairman of the Human Rights Committee and of the Social Affairs and Health Committee of the Chamber of Deputies.
In addition, Mario Marazziti is one of the promoters of the humanitarian corridors, the program that allows the most vulnerable forced refugees to arrive safely in Europe, and accompanies their social integration with the help of civil society. He is also one of the animators of the Età Grande (Great Age) Foundation, promoted by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Academy for Life of the Holy See, to help Western societies to value the life of the elderly in society.
Talking to Marazziti was not easy. When he was not in Syria or on another trip, he was preparing the meeting of grandparents with Pope Francis, or tasks of the Età grande Foundation. In the end, we practically became friends.
What does the Età Grande Foundation do?
- In the Paul VI Hall, on April 27, 2024, thousands of grandparents and grandchildren gathered around Pope Francis, in a strange time like ours, at the initiative of the Età Grande Foundation. It was created to restore dignity to old age and to start precisely from the "extra years", which feed the "material culture of discarding", the reconstruction of the ability to live together and also revive European humanism. It was like a vision of the world as it could be. That of the two world wars, that of reconstruction, that of democracy.
The future is reborn from here to escape the flattening of the present and the absence of dreams. By giving representation to the voice -ignored- of millions of elderly people and, together with them, of grandchildren, who in a world flattened on the present receive the memory and the value of the other, antidote against contemporary haste and loneliness, Pope Francis' catechesis on old age was given content, and a vision was drawn.
At the meeting there were testimonies...
- These days I have been wondering what is the difference between a father's love and a grandfather's love. It is a different love. It is a love, perhaps, "purer". Our only task is to love it. "Transmit without pretending," said a grandfather, Fabio. And this wisdom of gratuitousness was confirmed by his granddaughter Chiara: "With my parents, with my sister, it is an enormous love, but within this greatness there is also conflict. With my grandparents it is a more tender, complicit, patient love".
Gratitude and concern for others are like medicine in a world where everything is sold and everything is bought. And where the very word old age is frightening, like the conquest that it is.
Sofia, a 91-year-old woman born in Rome, explained it in personal terms: "I have wrinkles, but I don't feel like a burden. My personal experience leads me to say that it is possible to age well. The real burden of life is not old age, but loneliness." After the death of her husband, she decided to live with other people. She visits and telephones the elderly in institutions, and receives many young people in a co-housing of the Community of Sant'Egidio: she tells them the story of the war in Rome, the bombings, the solidarity, the choice to hide the Jews from Nazi persecution. A living and good memory for today.
Give us some thoughts on the Pope's words.
- Pope Francis, following John Paul II's Letter to the Elderly on the eve of the Great Jubilee, last year dedicated an entire cycle of catechesis to this age, to the "magisterium of fragility": a key to helping the world emerge from the "throwaway culture", of which migrants and the elderly are almost necessarily a part in a hyper-consumerist world that produces waste, including human waste. Old age as a litmus test of the level of our civilization.
The marginalization of the elderly corrupts all seasons of life, not just old age. She often returns to the fact of what her grandmother learned about Jesus, who loves us, who never leaves us alone, and who urges us to be close to one another and never exclude anyone. And the teaching never to take an elderly relative away from the table and the house because he or she has become ill.
Pope Francis embodies and communicates a Christianity rooted in the Gospel, which knows well that next to the sacrament of the table is the sacrament of the poor: the parable of the Last Judgment in chapter 25 of Matthew, the presence of Jesus and his body in each person alone, abandoned, poor, in each of these "my little brothers and sisters" is not incidental, it is constitutive. And he places this Gospel wisdom at the service of a bewildered world, which empties or inverts the meaning of words, which loses the sense of the horror of war to the point of turning it into a habitual companion: and thus makes the old man to whom we owe everything inapparent.
What happened to Covid-19 and the elderly?
- After the pandemic we could have understood: "We are in the same boat". But it seems that those who are not yet grown up always think that they are in another boat and have another destiny. In the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 40 % of all the victims of the first wave, in Italy, in Spain, in Europe, in the West, were elderly people in institutions. Another 25 % were elderly at home. This means that, given that the elderly in an institution represented only 3 % of the total number of elderly, the home alone, without services, without doctors, protected 15 times more the life of an elderly person in an institution.
This should have triggered a radical change in the overall welfare of the elderly, creating models of proximity, innovative forms of co-housing, small assisted living facilities, a continuum of networked social welfare services centered on the home, integrated home-based socio-health care, multiplying protected hospital discharges, since most pathologies are chronic, not acute. On the other hand, investments in nursing homes and institutions, which offer a guaranteed significant financial return, are on the rise.
There are many studies showing that loneliness doubles the risk of death from the same chronic diseases. But the system cannot change. In Italy a step forward has been taken with the law 33/2023, a historical turning point, which points out these actions at least as a complementary care pathway, but it is still underfunded. It may be the beginning of a counterculture and a rethinking. And then there is the Charter of the Rights of the Elderly, which the Gran Edad Foundation is also beginning to disseminate in Europe. These are starting points, which must be disseminated.
How can we ensure a fuller and better quality of life for the elderly?
- We started to do everything possible to keep our elderly at home. And to ask for support from public facilities, insurance, financial sector, in nurses, services, caregivers. It is a saving for healthcare and a gain for society. Even in the extreme phases of life, not in the acute ones. Our grandchildren will see that even dying is part of life and that there is great emotional intensity even when there is little life. They will not want us to end our days in loneliness and isolation, as when their hospitalized grandparents "disappeared," never to reappear after the Covid.
I know of many experiences promoted by the Community of Sant'Egidio of conviviality among elderly people, together with a caregiver, who fend for themselves; there are hundreds of them. They would all be people destined to an institution and to be a social cost, as well as human.
Can you share some indicators from Italy?
- In a Europe of 448.8 million people, with an average age of 44.5 years, and 21.3 % aged 65 and over, the average age in Italy was 45.7 years in 2020, and growing at a faster rate: 24.1 % aged 65 and over, and 46.5 years on average in 2023.
New births, as is well known, are declining rapidly, 379,000 in the last year. With a birth rate of 6.4 per thousand inhabitants: and it was 6.7 the previous year. But in Italy only happens before what also happens in France, in Spain.
Finally, some comments on the Ipsos research on the pastoral care of Italian dioceses with the elderly, presented at the Etá Grande Foundation.
- The Catholic Church itself, which is neither "denialist" nor "giovanilist" [youth activist], is well aware that the hair of many Christians is graying or whitening, but it does not yet have an active and specific response to these "extra years" which are a blessing, but risk being a curse. Ipsos research has for the first time studied the Church and its attitude towards older people. There is more attention than in the surrounding world, but mostly in the 'social and health' chapter, not in the 'people' chapter, brothers and sisters.
In Italy there are 14 million, but in the Church there is nothing like the attention it rightly pays to the less than 200,000 young adults who marry each year. Imagination is needed. And not just habit. Let us initiate this counter-narrative, which frees the world from fragmentation and reduces the sting of loneliness, which is the true pandemic of our time.
