A silent crowd welcomed in the historic center of Rosciano (Pe), in Piazza XXIV Maggio, the coffin of Cristopher Thomas Luciani, the sixteen-year-old killed last Sunday with 25 stab wounds, by two peers, in the park of Via Raffaello Sanzio in Pescara, for a drug debt. The white coffin is covered with light flowers.
Drugs “are the new leprosy that is gripping young people. We must not distance ourselves from those who experience hardship, but respond by taking to the streets, touching this reality and touching it with our commitment. I appeal, therefore, to those who already do so much, who they have responsibilities of administration, control and government: we must stop the merchants of death”, Monsignor Tommaso Valentinetti, metropolitan archbishop of Pescara-Penne, said in his homily in Rosciano (Pe).
In Rosciano and Pescara today there is citizen mourning. “This land where Christopher died is a land that does not belong to us, it cannot belong to us. During my priestly life, I have had 7 children die in the earthquake in San Giuliano di Puglia, but even this is now very difficult. I have examined my conscience… The responsibility for such a violent act, for such a premature death, 17 years old… a little less, who carries it? Those who committed the acts they should not have committed, of course, but I believe it is time to reflect on a collective assumption of responsibility. If these events happen, if the children become uncontrollable, it is a responsibility that we must all assume, not point the finger at each other. The responsibility is not only of one person or of one reality… We do not abandon the children… it cannot be like this. Institutions, school, family, Church, everyone must have a surge of responsibility. These things are not justifiable, they are not understandable. The presence of so many children here; so many flowers brought, even today, to the place where he died Cristopher, it means that we can have a surge of humanity and a surge of truth, a surge that must make the weapons fall from violent hands, that must make drugs go away”, the words of the archbishop.
