Blessed Pino Puglisi

Giuseppe "Pino" Puglisi was an Italian Roman Catholic priest who openly challenged the Sicilian Mafia controlling his Palermo neighbourhood of Brancaccio. The Mafia killed him on his 56th birthday. His life story has been retold in a book, Pino Puglisi, il prete che fece tremare la mafia con un sorriso (2013), and portrayed in a film, Come into the Light (Italian original title Alla luce del sole) in 2005. He was the first Mafia victim to be beatified by the Catholic Church. Puglisi was born in Brancaccio, a working-class neighbourhood in Palermo, Sicily, into a family of modest means. His father was a shoemaker and his mother a dressmaker. He entered the seminary at age sixteen. Following ordination, he worked in various parishes, including a country parish afflicted by a bloody vendetta. Puglisi was ordained as a priest on 2 July 1960 by Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini from Palermo. Ruffini regarded communism as a greater threat than the Mafia. He once questioned the Mafia's very existence. To a journalist's question of "What is the Mafia?" he responded: "So far as I know, it could be a brand of detergent." This denial persuaded Puglisi of the need to challenge church authorities. "We can, we must criticize the church when we feel it doesn't respond to our expectations, because it's absolutely right to seek to improve it," he said. With his trademark humour, Puglisi added: "But we should always criticize it like a mother, never a mother-in-law!" In 1990, Puglisi returned to his old quarter Brancaccio and became the pastor of San Gaetano's Parish. He spoke out against the Mafia who controlled the area and opened a shelter for underprivileged children. Puglisi had been offered other parishes by the local curia, in less troublesome Palermo neighbourhoods, but he opted for San Gaetano. With little support from the Palermo archdiocese, Puglisi tried to change his parishioners' mentality, which was conditioned by fear, passivity and word omertà (imposed silence).