I met Maurizio at Alfedena. I arrived at camp in the early afternoon of a splendid July day. Slowly, the faces of friends I had kept alive in my imagination during the journey became real.
Some were familiar; others were new. Maurizio welcomed me in the tent with the curious warmth that greets every newcomer.
A few kicks of a soccer ball and other games made us fast friends. I wanted to know him better. I learned about his past, heard him called a "difficult child," saw the long hair that made him look like a "wild boy."
When a person acts with aggression, it is because they are reacting to something they find unbearable. So I tried to build a bond of friendship and trust with him. I discovered in him a deep honesty and loyalty—but above all, a hunger for new life, for taking the first steps down a different path.
In any new journey, the first obstacles tempt us to turn back. Maurizio faced this too. The urge to call his mother would overtake him; sometimes he would slip back into his old destructive ways, or he would withdraw into a silence I read not as stubbornness but as thought. I tried in vain to understand what he was thinking.
The last days at camp were the most beautiful. Maurizio had found a friend his own age, fit more easily into the group, and made his peace with the others.
When it came time to leave, reserved as he was with his feelings, he let slip the sadness that all of us feel when we part from something good.
This is the hidden treasure I discovered in Maurizio during those vacation days: a treasure I would call "a path of resurrection and rebirth"—a desire to live a new life.
His struggle is also ours when we choose to turn our lives around.
Don Vito Palmisano, 1979
