When the 'shoeshine' boys
sped up the 'Scala Regia'
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| Neopolitan "Shoeshine boys" in 1944 |
Pope Francis on Monday received in audience a group of supporters
and friends of the organization “A Chance in Life”. The foundation runs what
are known as Boys’ and Girls’ Towns all over the world. As this Vatican Radio
Archive Programme narrates, the first "Boys' Town" was founded in
Rome by Irish priest, Monsignor Carroll-Abbing to provide WW2 orphans with a
home and an education.
By Veronica Scarisbrick
Today we see children escaping from war. And in a media
savvy world the images of these little ones fleeing from death and destruction
reach us in real time in our homes. Little ones who are victims of what
Pope Francis has often described as a ‘Third World War’ in his endless
appeals for peace which seem to fall on deaf ears.
Sadly history repeats itself. As you’ll hear in this
programme the appeals for peace of the Pope of the ‘Second World War’,
Pius XII also fell on deaf ears. But while in pre- media savvy days the images
of death and destruction hardly reached anyone there were still plenty of
children victims of that war.
Listen to Vatican Radio archive recordings in English of
Pius XII and of the late Monsignor Carroll- Abbing in a programme presented and
produced by Veronica Scarisbrick:
On one memorable occasion in the immediate aftermath of the
war Pius XII received some of these ‘orphans of the war’
inside the Apostolic Palace. It was the 10th of October 1945 when
over two thousand ‘sciuscià’, or ‘shoeshine boys’, some barefoot, rushed up the
‘Scala Regia’ of the Apostolic Palace. Little ones who bore in their
undernourished bodies and their old men and women’s ways the imprint of
war.
And when Pius XII spoke to them he used simple words
acknowledging how their experience of life had been marked by so much misery
and sadness. Many of you, he went on to say: “Have never even known your
parents having lost them under the bombs”.
Fortunately for those children the future held in store a
safe haven through the work of the man accompanying him, an
Irishman by the name of Carroll- Abbing. A Monsignor who
established ‘Boy’s Town of Italy’ for children made homeless by the war, like
those received by Pope Pius XII in the Apostolic Palace.
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