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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/04/pope-francis-s-homeless-guests-are-all-moving-to-st-peter-s-square.html
In numbers that have doubled in the last six months, the homeless are coming to
Vatican City to sleep in church-donated sleeping bags—at the invitation of the
pontiff.VATICAN CITY — It is nearly 8 p.m. on a Tuesday in early March, and the
Vatican is locked up for the night. A few stray tourists pose for pictures in
front of the glistening basilica of St. Peter, and cassock-wearing clergy skim
the perimeter of the square on their way home to dinner. In the shadows of the
famous colonnade and extending to the foot of the grand boulevard known as the
Via Conciliazione, dozens of men and a few women settle in for the night in
Vatican-issued sleeping bags. They are the welcomed guests of Pope Francis,
though not everyone in the neighborhood appreciates their presence. Joey, a
Romanian who used to bed down in Rome’s squalid Termini train station, moved to
St. Peter’s in late February. “We are all moving here,” he told The Daily
Beast. “Everyone else spits on the homeless. But not here.”By some estimates,
the number of homeless people now camping out near St. Peter’s Square has
doubled in the last six months, since the pope’s vow to return dignity to those
suffering the humiliation of extreme poverty. Rome city officials don’t keep
solid numbers on homeless people, though local charities put the number at
about 3,275. A nighttime police officer who guards the perimeter of St. Peter’s
Square told The Daily Beast that the numbers of homeless around Vatican City
are much higher than he had ever seen in his 10 years on the job, estimating
them at more than 1,000 in the immediate area. “We are told to leave them in
peace,” he said. “They don’t cause any trouble, and in the morning they spread
out. They are really only here in high numbers at night.”Francis began his
pontificate with a vow to turn the Catholic Church into a church for the poor.
One of his first gestures after he was elected in 2013 was to invitefour
homeless men to celebrate his 77th birthday at the hotel where he lives inside
the Vatican’s hallowed walls. This year he again invited a handful of homeless
to join him for his birthday lunch. Then he ordered his alms giver to hand out
hundreds of sleeping bags to those sleeping on the street.Under Francis, the
Vatican also has installed showers near the public bathrooms under the
colonnade, and every Monday, local volunteer barbers offer free haircuts once
the homeless men and women have taken showers. There are laundry services and a
clothes bank where those in need can get clean clothes. The only day the
showers aren’t available is Wednesday, when the pope’s general audience
attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. On those days, many homeless people
are tasked with handing out prayer books.“There has to be a balance in finding
the peace between those of us who pay a lot of rent to run our businesses here
and those who cash in for free.”Last week, the pope approved the burial of
Willy, an 80-year-old German homeless man who was a well-known parishioner in
the church of Santa Anna on the perimeter of Vatican City, in the sacred
cemetery inside Vatican City. Willy’s lifeless body was found in late December
and kept in a local morgue until early February, when someone made the
connection that Willy no longer came to Mass. The pope was apparently so
touched by the story that he insisted the homeless man be buried near the last
home he knew. “He attended 7 o’clock Mass every day for more than 25 years,”
Father Bruno Silvestrini, the priest of Santa Anna, told Vatican Radio. “He was
a rich person of great faith.”The generosity of the pope may be well received
by those in need, but it is not without complications. Store owners along the
Via Conciliazione have complained that the number of homeless people and
beggars detracts from business and that every morning they have to forcibly
remove those in the papal sleeping bags from their storefront steps. A woman at
a religious trinket shop who asked that she not be named lest she upset the
pope said his kindness was now a magnet attracting the city’s poorest people.
“I don’t want to group homeless people with pickpockets and thieves, but we
have also seen an increase in petty crime here since the homeless moved in,”
she said. “There has to be a balance in finding the peace between those of us
who pay a lot of rent to run our businesses here and those who cash in for
free.”There is also a logistical issue with the increase in street people. The
city’s charities and soup kitchens do a fine job feeding the poor, but there
are very few public toilets for the homeless to use—and a scant few that are
open overnight—which means that full corridors of side streets along the flanks
of Vatican City are littered with human feces and drenched in urine. Street
sweepers have acknowledged that they now spray down full sections of the areas
around St. Peter’s Square every morning before the tourists arrive.But the
upside of Francis’s generosity far outweighs the negative, and even the crew of
James Bond’s new movie, Spectre, joined in this week. While shooting an
overnight car chase between Bond’s Aston Martin and a flashy Jaguar, presumably
driven by Bond’s enemy in the film, along the Via Conciliazione, the crew
distributed hot meals to the hundreds of homeless people who were camped in the
middle of their movie set. One crew member told Il Messaggero newspaper that it
was to pay the homeless back for the inconvenience of shooting while they were
trying to sleep.
