by Michele Alonzo
It is at that time that 25-year-old Father Mario Borrelli decides to try the unimaginable. He feels it is his responsibility to love in the way Christ had loved: the only way to reach these wild children is to become just like them. So, after obtaining permission from the cardinal, with an amazing strategy, Father Mario begins his double life: during the day he teaches religion at a high school, but each night, right after his regular duties, he mingles with scugnizzi on the streets and acts just like them. Dressing in ragged and filthy clothes, he starts begging outside Naples train station, sharing misadventures with young boys in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. These marginalized children and young men are impressed by his style: just a right mixture of empathy and pathetic humility. Little by little, he blends in the tragic reality of the street urchins, and becomes poor among the poor, wanderer among wanderers, living for survivorship, with them.
After winter arrives, Mario informs the gang that he has found a place to stay for the night and they can try this shelter if they want: the abandoned ruins of the church of Saint Gennaro. Slowly he transforms the structure into a humble home that harbors indigent people and offers them a nourishing meal. During the day he uses a handcart to transport and sell used clothes and old shoes to collect useful money for the shelter. Some scugnizzi decide to follow Mario’s suggestion and try that place. One night he appears to them in full clerical robes. After his buddies stop laughing for what they believe a good joke, he explains that he is, in fact, a priest, causing great surprise among them. By this time, the bonds he has established are strong enough to convince them to stay; Mario has won their respect and trust. He decides to name that run-down building Casa dello Scugnizzo (House of the Urchins), where young throwaways can find a home and spiritual guidance. In only a few months, dozens of scugnizzi are sheltered and fed at the Casa, which little by little becomes an active community, more than an orphanage, where nobody is forced to stay unwillingly, but where everybody cooperates to the community’s expenses by working and helping others.
Mario Borrelli, born in the early '20s, is one of five children of a humble
working-class family, living in the city of Naples, Italy. As
many kids born in those struggling times, he must give up education in fourth
grade and go to work in order to help the tight finance of his family. At age
nine, he is employed in a barber’s shop and brings some money home. But Mario
always dreams to resume school and to study, despite his family's poor
condition. A few years later, when he is accepted in a Roman Catholic missionary
school, one of the clients at the barber’s shop, a catholic priest, tells Mario
he is willing to pay for his school fee for the first year. With many sacrifices of his family and
the help of the priest, Mario completes the studies
successfully. When he is consecrated priest, right after the end of WWII, he
becomes the factory chaplain in various companies, where he meets with
blue-collar workers. But his vocation is to reach out to street children,
the ones he remembers when growing up, to teach catechism and to save them from
a hopeless future. That’s when he decides to immerse himself in the poorest
streets in Naples, where hundreds of scugnizzi (street
urchins) live every day in very precarious conditions.
The scugnizzi in the post-war era are abandoned children, most of them orphans or born of unknown mother, who survive precariously by gimmicks and deceiving tricks. They have no lodging, let alone education, and in their extreme poverty, they elicit disdain more than pity by the upper class and more educated people. In those years, the streets of the heavily bombed city of Naples are home ground for gangs of scugnizzi, where they spend every day begging, pickpocketing and assisting older criminals. These kids are tough and clever, and somehow unreachable.
 |
| Father Mario with his scugnizzi |
The scugnizzi in the post-war era are abandoned children, most of them orphans or born of unknown mother, who survive precariously by gimmicks and deceiving tricks. They have no lodging, let alone education, and in their extreme poverty, they elicit disdain more than pity by the upper class and more educated people. In those years, the streets of the heavily bombed city of Naples are home ground for gangs of scugnizzi, where they spend every day begging, pickpocketing and assisting older criminals. These kids are tough and clever, and somehow unreachable.
It is at that time that 25-year-old Father Mario Borrelli decides to try the unimaginable. He feels it is his responsibility to love in the way Christ had loved: the only way to reach these wild children is to become just like them. So, after obtaining permission from the cardinal, with an amazing strategy, Father Mario begins his double life: during the day he teaches religion at a high school, but each night, right after his regular duties, he mingles with scugnizzi on the streets and acts just like them. Dressing in ragged and filthy clothes, he starts begging outside Naples train station, sharing misadventures with young boys in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. These marginalized children and young men are impressed by his style: just a right mixture of empathy and pathetic humility. Little by little, he blends in the tragic reality of the street urchins, and becomes poor among the poor, wanderer among wanderers, living for survivorship, with them.
One night, when a gang leader bullies and swaggers up him
demanding half of the money he has begged from people, Mario confronts and beats him up.
That act of courage really impresses the guys of the gang who pay respect to him. This incognito
priest continues to sleep for months on basement gratings covered with old newspapers, begging from bystanders, just
like the others. Soon he gets to know his buddies well, as they all talk around
fires, heating up their scraps of food in old tin cans. Father Mario discovers
that all of them, even the most bitter and hardened, are longing for home,
affection, and security.
 |
| The original Casa dello Scugnizzo |
After winter arrives, Mario informs the gang that he has found a place to stay for the night and they can try this shelter if they want: the abandoned ruins of the church of Saint Gennaro. Slowly he transforms the structure into a humble home that harbors indigent people and offers them a nourishing meal. During the day he uses a handcart to transport and sell used clothes and old shoes to collect useful money for the shelter. Some scugnizzi decide to follow Mario’s suggestion and try that place. One night he appears to them in full clerical robes. After his buddies stop laughing for what they believe a good joke, he explains that he is, in fact, a priest, causing great surprise among them. By this time, the bonds he has established are strong enough to convince them to stay; Mario has won their respect and trust. He decides to name that run-down building Casa dello Scugnizzo (House of the Urchins), where young throwaways can find a home and spiritual guidance. In only a few months, dozens of scugnizzi are sheltered and fed at the Casa, which little by little becomes an active community, more than an orphanage, where nobody is forced to stay unwillingly, but where everybody cooperates to the community’s expenses by working and helping others.
Father Mario Borrelli is the epicenter of this community,
where many adolescents and young men are offered hospitality, meals, boarding,
education and moral support, literally taking the place of their missing
families. He works vigorously to establish a network of communities and
voluntary groups distributed even outside Italy, to raise funds necessary to his
street urchins at Casa dello Scugnizzo. The individual engagement in
relationship to the needs of the community where they belong, leads these
kids to respect each other, to become more educated and to learn a trade, to
the point that most can leave and work regularly. Father Mario is now called by
everybody “Don Vesuvio”, for the explosive force of his actions and enthusiasm of his commitment.
The uncommon priest, coming from a poor city neighborhood, is reaching his goal: to give to many of these children freedom and access to respected working society. During those years he saves hundreds of kids from misery of street life and failure to thrive. Later he describes his mission as “the way to teach poor people the joy to give, rather than to take”. Up to the early ‘60s, Father Mario continues to strengthen his network of contacts in support of his initiatives. Within a few years, he obtains a degree in diplomatic and archival paleography, other than carrying out his pastoral activity, and even a Master in Social Administration at the London School of Economics.
The uncommon priest, coming from a poor city neighborhood, is reaching his goal: to give to many of these children freedom and access to respected working society. During those years he saves hundreds of kids from misery of street life and failure to thrive. Later he describes his mission as “the way to teach poor people the joy to give, rather than to take”. Up to the early ‘60s, Father Mario continues to strengthen his network of contacts in support of his initiatives. Within a few years, he obtains a degree in diplomatic and archival paleography, other than carrying out his pastoral activity, and even a Master in Social Administration at the London School of Economics.
However, he soon realizes that the underlying problems,
the causes of abandonment and social exclusion remain mostly unresolved. He comes
to contrast with the Neapolitan clerical power, which wants to allocate the
money collected for his Casa dello Scugnizzo in other projects and even
offers him a respectable regular salary in order to win his resistance. Father
Mario refuses: the scugnizzi come before everybody and everything else.
It is at this point that he comes to the
decision to leave priesthood. His personal moral views are incompatible to those
of Neapolitan Christian church, whose conservative position appears to him in
contrast with the Christian mission, and adverse to the social changes
necessary to the human development of the working class. He says “When I realized that this Church
remained distant and absent from the poor, I felt cheated in my vocation. I
felt as a prisoner, a wheel of a mechanism that tended to save and perpetuate
itself instead of saving and helping others.”
For ten more years, the community center created in Naples by former Father Mario continues to focus its activities on the defense of women and children rights, on the poor working-class
schooling and health, especially during the outbreak of cholera that strikes
the city in the early ‘70s. His inspiring believes lead to substantial private charitable contribution, but the political system is still unable to
carry on effective social programs for derelicts, homeless and outcast. In
an interview released in those years he states: “Until everyone continues to
rush, and wants to be first, to gain more at any expense, even by stomping on
others in every sense, it will be difficult to entrench peace, which consists
essentially in the perfect balance between power and resources. What is
necessary instead is a work of social reform, where the cooperation of others is
essential. In the end, humanity is like a brick wall: every row needs the
other rows to avoid collapsing. Courage is not heroism: it is a moral duty, a
social responsibility”
After having
lived and taught in England for many years, in 2006 professor Mario
Borrelli returns to Naples for a visit. In his hometown he finds poor immigrants
and refugees from other parts of the world, who basically have replaced the
old desperate scugnizzi of the post-war era. Still at age 84, he denotes
the inefficiency of the political leaders in a corrupted system that he defines
prostitution of the power.
Mario
Borrelli dies a few months later in Oxford, England. The newspaper “The Times”
dedicates many pages to his story, also published in the chapter “A light in
the dark”, included in Morris West’s book titled “Children of the Sun”.
