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Biography

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Giuseppe Puglisi, known throughout Sicily as Don Pino, was born on 15 September 1937 in Brancaccio, a crowded working-class quarter of Palermo. His father was a cobbler and his mother a seamstress, and he grew up in the social hardship and criminal pressure that marked much of the city after the Second World War. He entered the seminary of the Archdiocese of Palermo and was ordained a diocesan priest on 2 July 1960. In the years that followed he combined parish work with teaching religion and with a sustained ministry among young people. For a period in the 1970s he served in the inland Sicilian town of Godrano, where he already showed a readiness to resist Mafia interference in local life and to treat reconciliation and civic courage as part of ordinary pastoral care.

In 1990 he was appointed parish priest of San Gaetano in Brancaccio and returned to the neighborhood of his birth, then dominated by the Graviano clan of Cosa Nostra. He refused the customary accommodations with organized crime. He would not give Mafia bosses places of honor in religious processions, declined their offerings, and preached openly against omertà, extortion, and the drawing of children into criminal networks. He built educational and recreational work around the parish so that local youth might have an alternative to the street and to Mafia patronage, and he cooperated with teachers, social workers, and other clergy who sought to loosen the bosses’ hold on everyday life. That stance made him a conspicuous opponent of the organization that controlled the quarter.

On the evening of 15 September 1993, his fifty-sixth birthday, he was shot at close range in the back of the neck outside the building where he lived in Brancaccio. The killer, later identified as the hitman Salvatore Grigoli, said the priest’s last words were that he had been expecting them. The murder was ordered by the Graviano brothers. Investigations and the testimony of pentiti in the years that followed led to convictions of those who commissioned and carried out the killing. Coming after the murders of the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the assassination drew national attention to the Mafia’s war on anyone, including priests, who refused its authority.

The Church opened a cause for beatification and, after examining both his life and the circumstances of his death, recognized him as a martyr killed in hatred of the faith, on the ground that his pastoral opposition to the Mafia was an expression of the Gospel that his killers rejected. Pope Benedict XVI approved the decree of martyrdom. Puglisi was beatified on 25 May 2013 at a large outdoor Mass in Palermo, with Cardinal Angelo Amato presiding as representative of Pope Francis. He is commemorated liturgically on 21 October. Blessed Pino Puglisi is remembered as a priest who treated the struggle against organized crime as an integral part of Christian ministry to the poor, and the parish of San Gaetano in Brancaccio remains closely associated with his memory.

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