`The day that I became a man of honour (mafioso), my finger was cut and some of the blood was smeared over a little picture of the Virgin Mary which was then set on fire. As I passed the burning image from hand to hand I was told to say the following: As a piece of paper, I burn you; as a saint, I worship you; just as this piece of paper burns, so must my flesh burn if I betray Cosa Nostra . . . That day made a big impression on me"
That description of Sicilian Mafia initiation rites was provided by the former mafioso turned state collaborator Leonardo Messina. His description of his "signing-on ceremony" is not original. Indeed, many other former mafiosi have told the same tale, repeating the same ritual recitation, word for word.
Right from the beginning, it would seem, a mafioso or uomo d'onore (man of honour) must understand a basic reality about his new found secret society, a reality which never fails to surprise and dismay outsiders. Namely, that where there is the Mafia, there is the church ; where there are mafiosi, there are practising Catholics.
In a week when the 58-year-old Carmelite priest, Padre Mario Frittitta, was arrested on charges of Mafia collusion, attention has once again focussed on the uneasy relationship between Cosa Nostra and the Catholic faith, between infamous mafiosi and individual priests.
Padre Frittitta is accused of having aided and abetted mafiosi who were fugitives from justice. Palermo-based investigating magistrates believe that he not only visited Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri while the latter was on the run but that he celebrated Mass in an ad-hoc chapel that the devout Aglieri had constructed for himself in the Bagheria, Sicily hideout where he was arrested last June.
Furthermore, the investigators believe that Padre Frittitta presided over the marriage of another mafioso on the run, Giovanni Garafolo, on December 23rd last. The marriage, held in the Church of St Teresa in the tough Kalsa zone of Palermo, took place in secret and at dawn so as not to arouse the curiosity of local residents.
If the charges brought against Padre Frittitta this week were to be substantiated, they would represent nothing new in the grisly annals of Mafia history. Take the case of the legendary "Don Calo", Calogero Vizzini, the Mafia godfather reputed to have greeted American generals as they arrived to lead the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. He is reputed to have said the Lord's Prayer and one or two Hail Marys every night before going to bed. Furthermore, on his deathbed, he was attended by two bishops and three priests.
Legend also has it that no less than three priests from the town of Corleone presided over the marriage of "Toto" Riina, the boss of bosses currently serving a series of life sentences on murder convictions but at the time on the run. In his book, The Men Of Dishonour, the Catania ex-mafioso Antonio Calderone recalls that one of the priests who presided at Riina's secret marriage service was a certain Padre Agostino Coppola, a man who had taken vows of faith not only to God but also to Cosa Nostra and who had been presented to him in 1968 as a uomo d'onore by another godfather.
When the mafioso Pietro Aglieri, the man allegedly aided and abetted by Padre Frittitta, was arrested in June, much was made of the fact that he had not only created his own chapel but that he had also a collection of prayer books and religious texts in his hideout. How could a man who had a large part in the car- bomb killing of the anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino in 1992 consider himself a Christian?
The same question could be asked about Enzo Scarantino, another of those involved in blowing up Judge Borsellino, but who regularly did the collection at his local Palermo church on Sundays. The Mafia bosses of the 1970s and 1980s Michele Greco and Nitto Santapaolo, men with direct responsibility and/or involvement in the violent, sometimes sadistic deaths of perhaps hundreds of people, both had only the Bible on their persons when they were finally arrested.
Godfathers like Santapaolo, Greco and Riina all had occasional contact with individual priests while fugitives from justice, be that contact in the guise of "spiritual advice" (Padre Frittitta defends himself by saying that he merely offered spiritual advice to Pietro Aglieri) or for the celebration of a Mass or a wedding.
Whether such meetings between priest and mafioso represent Mafia collusion is an issue for the judiciary. What is sure is that, over the years, the behaviour of some Sicilian priests has caused concern in the Sicilian church especially among those priests, such as the Jesuits Bartolomeo Sorge and Ennio Pintacuda, who have risked their lives by putting themselves in the front line of the fight against the Mafia. That concern was made manifest in an open letter sent by some Sicilian priests to Pope John Paul II on the eve of a 1993 visit to Sicily, a letter which called for a "powerful sign" from the Pope "because there are priests and Bishops who are not authentic witnesses of the freedom that Christ wishes for this island".
Central to the concern raised by that open letter was the suspicion that prominent Sicilian church figures had been silent for too long, with that silence perhaps representing a tacit Mafia collusion. It is also arguable that elements in the Sicilian church were sympathetic to Cosa Nostra, not only because of family or blood ties, but also because it is and was an organisation opposed to the process of modernisation and one which, superficially at least, honours traditional values and the faith itself. Perhaps influenced by the open letter and certainly moved by first hand reports from his advisers, the pope used that May 1993 pastoral visit to not only berate sections of the Sicilian church for failing in their Christian duty in fighting the Mafia, but also to issue his strongest ever condemnation of Cosa Nostra, calling it "the work of the Devil" and, his voice shaking with anger, telling those at a mass in Agrigento: "The Lord has said, Thou shalt not kill. No man, no group, no Mafia can change or trample all over our Holy Lord. This people, the people of Sicily . . . cannot forever suffer the oppression of a contrary civitas, a culture of death . . . To those responsible, to the mafiosi, I say: Repent, the Day of Judgement will one day come for you".
The Pope's teaching on the Mafia is unequivocal, the Sicilian Church's relationship with the Mafia rather less so.