Murders most foul
Perrotta, John
8 ¥ Murders most foul he assassination on March 19 of a Roman Catholic priest near Naples who had spoken out against the mob stunned a...
...He did this by dissuading young girls from prostitution, by setting up a sports facility for young people, and by operating a community center that helped people find honest jobs...
...I expected much more...
...Puglisi also refused to permit unrepentant Mafia members from serving as godparents at baptisms...
...JOHN PERROTTA John Perrotta is a free-lance journalist who lives in Rome...
...The other assassinated cleric, the Reverend Giuseppe Puglisi, fifty-six, was a parish priest in the Mafia-infested neighborhood of Brancaccio in Palermo, Sicily...
...Pino Arlacchi, a Mafia expert at Florence University, predicts more assassinations: "The church hierarchy has lent very little support to local-level priests, beyond occasional papal declarations," he said...
...Investigators quickly established a link between the Camorra and the slaying of Father Diana...
...Puglisi's unpardonable sin was to upset the equilibrium of the neighborhood by creating alternatives to mob crime...
...8 ¥ Murders most foul he assassination on March 19 of a Roman Catholic priest near Naples who had spoken out against the mob stunned a nation still recovering from the shock of another murder of an outspoken priest last September in Sicily...
...The cold-blooded shooting of the Reverend Giuseppe Diana, thirty-six, took place in the sacristy of his parish church in the squalid town of Casal di Principe, north of Naples, as he prepared to say Mass...
...In 1991, Diana and six other priests had signed a statement condemning the Camorra as "terrorists" and "the plague," and had urged their fellow priests to speak clearly "in their homilies and on all those occasions requiring courageous testimony...
...It came only four days after Diana and other priests had testified before magistrates about the Camorra's ties with local politicians, administrators, businesses, and vote-fixing...
...He was shot in the back of the head as he was entering his house...
...While the Italian state has increased armed escorts and other protection for priests at risk, neither the Vatican nor the Italian bishops' conference took immediate concrete action as a result of the assassinations...
...The murders appear to be the reaction of the Sicilianbased Mafia and one of its mainland cousins, the Naplescentered Camorra, to the decline of its traditional power base—the scandal-ridden and now defunct Christian Democratic party—and to a church slowly taking an assertive stance against the mob...
Vol. 121 • June 1994 • No. 11
