This refers to Conrado de Quiros’ July 1 column titled
“Excommunication.”
I am wondering if De Quiros was in full possession of his mental capacities when he wrote the following line: “The Church has always been a good friend of the Mafia, many Mafiosi being good contributors to its coffers. In return, the Church has given them an institutional front, legitimizing their activities and giving them respectability in society.” Not content with the opening salvo against the Church in general, De Quiros focused on the Italian clergy in particular, quoting as his main reference John Dickie: “There is a long history of silence and complicity with the Catholic Church (in Italy) and the Mafia.”
Depicting the Italian Catholic clergy as chaplains, promoters and beneficiaries of the Italian Mafia is tantamount to accusing Jose Rizal and the Kapituneros of supporting and defending the Spanish regime—an absurd lie that completely adulterates the truth. If we were in Italy, I would say that De Quiros has written “una cagata pazzesca”! Indeed, it is crazy sh-t to accuse the Italian Church of connivance with—and worse, of promoting—organized crime.
The Catholic Church in Italy is the only institution, along with the State, that has consistently and heroically fought the abuses of the Mafia. The hundreds of policemen and magistrates who died in the line of duty fighting the Mafia and its offspring, such as the ’Ndrangheta and the Camorra, were Catholics. Judge Giovanni Falcone, assassinated in 1992, along with his wife and three escorting policemen, for his anti-Mafia campaign, was a devoted Catholic; the same can be said of his good friend and colleague, Judge Paolo Borsellino, who was blown away two months later with dynamite, together with five escorting policemen.
The greatest majority of Catholic bishops and priests assigned in Mafia-infested areas of south Italy have been fighting courageously against the syndicate. Fr. Pino Puglisi, a parish priest in Palermo, was killed in 1993 for challenging the Mafia; and Msgr. Giancarlo Bregantini, then bishop of Locri, was transferred to another see because of the death threats he received after excommunicating the Mafiosi in his diocese. And the list of anti-Mafia Catholics can go on, ad infinitum, including religious sisters, catechists, church workers, teachers and the youth.
De Quiros is obviously ignorant of the real situation on the ground in Italy, especially considering that his two major sources are “The Godfather” and Dickie. What he has written about the alliance between the Italian Church and the Mafia is an offense to those who are fighting and have died in the line of anti-Mafia duty, and can be commented only in one way: “una cagata pazzesca.”