“Twenty, sixty, a hundred years… life. What is it worth if we are heading in the wrong direction?” Don Pino Puglisi asked his young people. And he concluded: “What matters is encountering Christ, living as he did, proclaiming his saving Love. Bringing hope and not forgetting that everyone, each in their own place, even at the cost of personal sacrifice, is building a new world.”
A martyr of our times
Don Pino paid the personal price to build the new world in which he believed, falling under three shots fired by the Mafia on September 15, 1993, exactly thirty years ago, on the day of his 56th birthday. The masterminds behind the murder were Mafia bosses Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano, who were later sentenced to life imprisonment. The shooter, however, was Salvatore Grigoli, a man who appeared to begin a journey of conversion while in prison. Grigoli himself recounted the Sicilian priest’s final moment before he was killed: “A smile, and then the words: ‘I expected it’”.
His mission: educating young people about legality
Blessed Pino Puglisi, parish priest of the Brancaccio neighborhood in Palermo, was a man of courage and faith, a model priest among the marginalized and in the outskirts; he was a gentle and tenacious shepherd, a man who loved to engage in dialogue with everyone; a courageous priest capable of reconciling two mothers: the mother of a murderer and the mother of his victim; an educator who tried every means to rescue young people and children from the criminal underworld to which they seemed destined.
Don Pino was also the “troublesome” parish priest whom the Mafia feared. A martyr who gave a voice back to a Church that had remained silent for too long. The Blessed man who taught Sicily of his time and of the future a “method”…
Brancaccio, that neighborhood of the city of Palermo controlled by the Mafia where “it is easier to say what is there; everything else is missing,” was the center of his commitment, which began with educating the children of the neighborhood: literacy had to be promoted and school camps created, in an area where, the day after the Capaci massacre, children shouted in the streets: “We won! Long live the Mafia!” Thus the Padre Nostro Center was born, a place where young people could be welcomed, taken off the streets, and rescued from crime.
Beatification and anniversary
This priest was elevated to the honors of the altars by Pope Francis on May 25, 2013, in the presence of more than 100,000 faithful who had come from all over Italy.
And even today, in the letter sent to Archbishop Corrado Lorefice, archbishop of Palermo, the Holy Father states: “Following the example of Jesus, Don Pino went all the way in love. He possessed the same qualities as the gentle and humble ‘good shepherd’: his young people, whom he knew one by one, bear witness to a man of God who favored the little ones and the defenseless, educated them in freedom, and taught them to love and respect life. This priest did not stop; he gave himself out of love, embracing the Cross to the shedding of his blood.”
