Giuseppe Puglisi

Father Giuseppe Puglisi (1937–1993) was a Roman Catholic priest, beatified 2013. Father Puglisi was born in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, where he worked all his life, and was murdered by the Mafia in September 1993 – on his 56th birthday. His death is considered to have been martyrdom.

Life and Ministry

Giuseppe "Pino" Puglisi was born into a working-class family in the poor Brancaccio neighborhood in 1937. His father was a shoemaker while his mother sometimes worked as a dressmaker.

Puglisi was ordained in 1960 by Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, the Archbishop of Palermo who infamously declared that the Mafia did not exist. Following service in a series of parishes in the area around Palermo, Puglisi was assigned to St Gaetan in the crime-ridden area of Brancaccio in 1990. He opened a social center for poor children and, in the course of his work, spoke out against the Mafia, which essentially controlled that part of Palermo as well as other districts.

Puglisi's campaign had the effect of breaking the wall of silence around the Mafia and dissuading people from co-operating with their gang activities. His courageous efforts drew little support from the Archdiocese or other authorities. Many took the position that the Mafia did not actually exist or that its prevalence was exaggerated to "defame" Sicilians, or Italians generally. In fact, politicians at the highest levels of Italy's national government were protecting the Mafia, which encouraged Sicilians to vote for candidates of the Christian Democratic party, often through the outright purchase of votes.

In 1992, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were murdered for exposing the Mafia, yet even that did not deter Puglisi. He continued to preach.

Assassination

Fr Puglisi was killed outside his home in the Brancaccio district, with a bullet to the head on 15 September 1993 by a band of thugs led by Salvatore Grigoli, a hitman for the local Graviano clan. In addition to Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano, several others (Gaspare Spatuzza, Nino Mangano, Cosimo Lo Nigro, Luigi Giacalone) later received life sentences for this and numerous other murders.

Beatification

Fr Puglisi was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, twenty years after his death. A crowd of eighty thousand people came to witness the ceremony.