"In this extraordinary circumstance generated by the global coronavirus pandemic, the Family International Monitor is also directly affected by the radical changes that the pandemic has triggered."
That is the beginning of the note published on their website today, thursday 30th April, by the Family International Monitor, the international observatory on families created in 2018 by the Pontifical Theological Institute John Paul II, the Catholic University of Murcia and the International Centre for Family Studies in Milan, in which the Presidents of the three founding institutions, Mgr Pierangelo Sequeri, Josè Luis Mendoza and father Antonio Rizzolo, highlight the reactions that the Covid 19 pandemic is causing in the family system on an economic, relational and social level.
"The community - we read in the text - has entrusted the family with a decisive task for the common good, asking every home to become a safe haven. The first resource put at stake were therefore precisely family relationships, their resistance, resilience, solidity and flexibility. At the end of the emergency many will probably treasure the beauty of the experienced family proximity, but for many there will be a need for help, relational support, reparation from conflicts and relational clashes that forced proximity will surely have generated. It would be a serious mistake not to support families and their relationships, in the not easy path towards a normality that will certainly not be the same as before".
Furthermore, there is no lack of reference to the most fragile categories, the main victims of the pandemic and the consequent social containment measures adopted, which are more and more dramatically affecting those who were already in serious social, economic and health care precariousness and vulnerability (the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the homeless, the marginalized), to a profoundly different extent depending on the territorial and economic contexts of reference.
"It is one thing to be "locked indoors" in a small house with a garden, it is another to be "forced indoors" in a slum in the African or South American megalopolis. The strategies of containment of the pandemic certainly cannot be the same as those adopted in the metropolises of Lombardy or in the small villas of the residential districts of the United States".
Certainly, the text concludes, in order to take care of the new scenarios that this epochal crisis is delineating, it will be necessary to enhance and strengthen the great capacity of mobilization and support that civil society and the whole system of aid relations have shown in this period, reinventing themselves also with new forms of remote aid, "to make the last ones less last" and contain that push to the "culture of waste that can take possession of people, organizational systems, governments".
Within the more general objective of reading the role of the family in the humanization of contemporary society, the Family International Monitor is dealing with the theme of family and poverty in the three-year period 2019-2021, considering the aspects of relational poverty (with a first report in 2020) and economic-structural poverty (with a final report in 2021).
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