Italian
At the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, lawyer Menorello calls for building communities and relationships to support families and the desire for parenthood
RIMINI – During the 2025 edition of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, held in Rimini, lawyer Domenico Menorello, president and founding member of the associative network Ditelo sui tetti, presented reflections and concrete proposals to promote a more desirable and sustainable birthrate in Italy.
A lawyer and philosopher of law with a doctorate from the University of Padua, Menorello has extensive political experience, having served as a municipal and provincial councilor in Padua and as a deputy in the XVII legislature. Today he coordinates the parliamentary observatory Vera Lex and actively participates in numerous cultural and social initiatives.
The associative network Ditelo sui tetti brings together around one hundred organizations committed to promoting human dignity, subsidiarity, and solidarity. Menorello presented the proposal for a “Shared Subsidiary Public Agenda,” focusing on themes such as family, birthrate, welfare, and social justice, with the aim of valuing the person as a whole and promoting inclusive policies that respect fundamental rights.
In the interview at the Meeting, Menorello emphasized the importance of cultivating relationships and communities to make birth and parenthood more desirable. “We have worked, observed, and studied over these days,” he explained, “the first concrete action to make birth desirable is to believe in relationships: to accompany the desire for motherhood and fatherhood, which, if a person feels alone, can be intimidating.”
Menorello referred to the African proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child,” highlighting that support for the family cannot be limited to the nuclear unit, but also involves grandparents, schools, and the broader community. “There is a world that bends, amazed and full of wonder, over every new life,” he added.
Asked about the influence of culture and social perception on the decision to become parents, Menorello replied: “It has a great influence, because we live in a cultural context that tells us the value of life is when we possess ourselves and control our own destiny. This is a distortion, because it almost never happens: solitude and individualism are elevated as a model, and this saddens, because it does not correspond to the great human desire to seek fulfillment beyond ourselves. We need a culture that promotes a vision of the whole human being—open, curious, rooted in reality, and eager to learn from what is outside oneself.”
Menorello cited as a concrete example the life support centers present at the Meeting’s stand, which over the past fifty years have assisted nearly 900,000 women in their desire for motherhood and have enabled the birth of over 280,000 children. “When someone becomes a neighbor, like the Good Samaritan, motherhood and fatherhood become easier and more desirable, opportunities for wonder and strength for the entire society,” he emphasized.
Responding to a question about a recent incident in Padua, where a councilor displayed rainbow ribbons for her newborn child, Menorello observed: “When birth, one of the greatest events in everyone’s life, is instrumentalized for supposed ideological purposes, the miracle of birth itself is diminished. Rather than focusing on the ribbon, we should all rejoice together for the child who was born.”
The interview with Domenico Menorello at the Rimini Meeting 2025 offered concrete insights on addressing the challenge of birthrates in Italy, highlighting community, relationships, and inclusive policies as fundamental tools to support families. Thanks to the work of Ditelo sui tetti, it is possible to build a society more attentive to the person, the family, and the common good.
For more information on Ditelo sui tetti and its initiatives: https://www.suitetti.org/
