Caravita soup kitchen: learning from the poor

A soup kitchen to train young people to serve the poor to respond to the growing perception of poverty in Rome’s historic centre.

This is how the canteen of the St. Francis Xavier Oratory in Caravita was born 8 years ago. “Our guests,” Fr. Massimo Nevola SJ, National Assistant CLC and Student Missionary League, and founder of this initiative explains, “are non-EU and Italian, many of them elderly who cannot make ends meet. I noticed this situation when I was assigned from the Massimo Institute to the St. Ignatius Community in the centre of Rome. While teaching at the adjacent Visconti High School, the idea matured: “to serve the poor, so that even young people can concretely experience the beauty of a shared journey with the most fragile”.

It started with the food: students, ex-students, and teachers would bring the food. Today, hundreds of volunteers rotate through the cafeteria every day. Lunch is served in two shifts to about 150 people a day. On Saturdays, the kitchen is staffed by volunteers who shop, prepare meals in the adjoining Jesuit Community and serve. “Here you don’t just bring food, you sit and eat with them, you listen, you talk, you build relationships,” Fr. Massimo adds. This is confirmed by some young volunteers from the Boy Scouts of Europe who prepared for the Youth Jubilee: “We started by preparing the tables and bringing the food. Then we sat and ate and talked with them like a family,” 15-year-old Chiara said. “It was very enriching to meet people who have so many different stories and who are not valued in society,” adds Giorgio, 16. To look at these people in a different way, without prejudice, is already love,” Gaia points out. “It is a shared journey “, Oronzo Labarile, former teacher and volunteer concludes, “listening to the different needs of volunteers and guests”.