The new Scalabrini Village in Montréal, in the Canadian province of Québec, will be located around a former church that has become a multifunctional center. The work, underway in the northern district of Ahuntsic, begins in August and should be completed by December 2022.
A tunnel will bring the buildings to the multifunctional center
There will be more than 50 apartments that will make up a unique project of its kind, conceived by Father Giuseppe Fugolo and other religious of the Mission Mère-des-Chrétiens. The site of the former church of Santa Rita was acquired in 2002 to become a center of refuge for migrants and refugees; now it will be the focal point of a small country that can also count on internal and external parks, a piazza and, in the surrounding areas, schools and parks.
The multifunctional center is made up of six rooms and can accommodate up to three hundred people. The tenants of the apartments (among whom there are also retired priests) can reach it directly through a tunnel connected to the apartments.
"A kind of oratory"
"Projects of this kind have already been carried out in Australia, California and Chicago - said Father Fugolo in the newspaper Il cittadino canadese (p. 13) - but they are mostly aimed at the elderly. In this case, we're mainly talking about people who are at least fifty years old, couples or single people who are already on a pension or with children who are already spouses and far away, people who are selling their home and moving into an apartment.
Around the former Santa Rita church, which we have preserved as a cultural heritage, we have restructured and transformed it into a community center, and we have built some apartments to finance the social activities of the center itself, as well as the work of the Scalabrinians in favor of migrants moving around the world. (...) More than a parish church, it will be a kind of oratory".
Source: Scalabriniani
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