Is it likely for Pope Francis be shot just as Pope John Paul was shot for publicly and boldly telling the dreaded Drug Lords and Mafia Chiefs to repent or rot in hell?
Pope Francis demanded that Mafia bosses should repent their sins last night, in the Roman Catholic Church’s most powerful challenge to the crime syndicate for the past 20 years.
The Pope made an impassioned speech as he met 700 relatives of innocent victims of organised crime at an emotional prayer vigil in a Rome parish church.
The names of 842 people killed by members of Italy’s ruthless organised crime groups over the past 120 years were read out at the ceremony in the Church of St Gregory VII organised by the Libera Foundation, a Catholic anti-crime group.
“To the absent protagonists, to the men and the women of the Mafia, please change your lives; repent,” Pope Francis said in a brief but intense speech at the end of the ceremony. “This life will not give you happiness. The power and the money that you have now comes from so many Mafia crimes. It is bloody money, bloody power that you cannot take with you to the next life.
“Repent and transform your lives so that you do not end up in Hell, which is what awaits you. You had a mother and a father, think of them and repent.”
Among those present was Rosaria Costa, the widow of one of the police bodyguards killed when a bomb blew up under the car of Giovanni Falcone, a leading anti-Mafia judge, as he drove on a highway near Palermo in 1992. Also attending was Nando Dalla Chiesa, whose father, Carabiniere General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, was shot dead by Mafia gunmen in 1983.
“Other popes have pronounced tough words against the Mafia but here the Pope is coming to mingle with the victims who are seeking justice,” General Dalla Chiesa said. “It’s a great embrace that represents a real revolution for us.”
Last November, an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Calabria warned that Pope Francis’s life might be at risk because his reforms of the scandal-wracked Vatican bank were making it more difficult for crime gangs to launder their illicit profits.
The Pope has condemned people-trafficking and the injustices wreaked by globalised capitalism, but this was the first time he had taken such a public stand against Italy’s criminal organisations.
The meeting, which was broadcast live on state television, was organised by Father Luigi Ciotti, a Turin-based priest who founded Libera in 1995. Several instances of Mafia ruthlessness have shocked the Italian public in recent months.
In January, a three-year-old boy, Nicola Campolongo, was shot dead with his grandfather and the man’s female companion. All three bodies were found in a burnt-out car.
At the beginning of this week, another three-year-old, Domenico Petruzzelli, was shot dead with his mother and stepfather as they drove on a country road in Puglia.
Two other children, aged 6 and 7, survived by playing dead when their car was riddled with bullets.
The last time the Catholic Church issued such a public challenge to the Mafia was when Pope John Paul II called on its members to repent during a mass in the Sicilian town of Agrigento in May 1993.
Two months later, bombs planted by the Mafia blew up outside two churches in the centre of Rome.
THE TIMES
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