At the Tent City of San Ferdinando, the "Laundry of Pope Francis" opens for service

At the Tent City of San Ferdinando, the "Laundry of Pope Francis" was inaugurated, offering free laundry and shower services to immigrant workers and the underprivileged. The facility began operating on Wednesday, according to La Repubblica and Terra.

The laundry and shower services provide essential hygiene facilities to low-income individuals, homeless people, and migrant workers. Located in front of the settlement established in March 2019, the initiative aims to restore dignity to those living in difficult conditions. ANSA reported that the inauguration was attended by Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the Apostolic Almoner; Monsignor Francesco Savino, Vice President of the Italian Episcopal Conference; Monsignor Giuseppe Alberti; the Mayor of San Ferdinando, Luca Gaetano; and the Prefect of Reggio Calabria, Clara Vaccaro.

Cardinal Krajewski emphasized the importance of the initiative. "The Holy Father has opened laundries and showers in many places. This is an evangelical gesture to give dignity to people but also to show others that these difficult places exist today," he is quoted by ANSA. "They are places of shame for all of us: there is no electricity, there is no gas, and often there is not even running water."

The Tent City of San Ferdinando remains crowded with hundreds of migrants living in poor conditions. Many of these individuals are employed in the citrus fruit harvest in the Piana di Gioia Tauro, waiting for residence permits. Cardinal Krajewski recounted to Avvenire: "When I went, I asked: 'What do you need?' They answered: 'We want to be visible!' A boy looked me in the eyes and said: 'We have lived here for many years, we need documents. Motorbikes have a license plate, we human beings have nothing.'"

The new facility includes a laundry with four large washing machines and four dryers in one container, and five showers in another. This initiative also provides a "Help Desk" to assist immigrants with procedures regarding their documents, La Repubblica reported. The services aim to give concrete form to charity and to restore dignity to many people, starting with the poorest.

The "Laundry of Pope Francis" in San Ferdinando is the seventh such facility after those in Rome, Genoa, Turin (two), Naples, and Catania, according to Avvenire. The Diocese plans to expand further. "We will create another laundry with a barber shop in Drosi, a fraction of Rizziconi, in a building offered by the Municipality, which will also pay the utilities. The barber shop will be managed by immigrants and therefore will also be an opportunity for real work," Michele Vomera, the director of Caritas, explained to Avvenire. 

At the soup kitchen in San Ferdinando, 300 hot meals are distributed in a few minutes, and recently, 300 blankets were given out swiftly, Vomera stated. With the addition of laundries and showers, there is a reminder "for all of us not to forget that the true measure of a society is found in the way it treats its most fragile members," reported Avvenire.

This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq