A decades-long cinematic journey built through testimonies of experts, representatives of institutions, and men of the Church, show how the mafia and the Church, since the post-war period, side by side with each other, have been obsequious and indifferent, never enemies and never adversaries, so much so that in the 1960s, faced with the massacres of carabinieri and innocent victims, he stated that the mafia did not exist.
This plot is told in the documentary film Our church by Antonio Bellia, written with the journalist Francesco La Licata and produced by Word Video Production (presented today as a national preview in Palermo at the Rouge et Noir cinema).
The priests were complicit, but their role in the collusion with the mafia was not significant. They were the boss instead they had the idea that holy cards and confessions could tolerate even the most ferocious of murders, a misunderstanding on which the mafiosi built the myth of their impunity, and on which the Sicilian Church for a long time developed its own useful concept of disengagement .
There is the cardinal of Palermo, Ernesto Ruffini, who in a letter to Pope Paul VI in 1963 considered that the mafia was the result of social-communist propaganda against Christian Democracy. Because he was probably anxious to defend the DC, the great comfortable Catholic enclosure. Just think that at the time the priests chose not to baptize the children of the communists, but they did not have the strength to challenge the mafia power system.
A journey of lights and shadows that tells how mafia and religious power have sometimes overlapped, sometimes clashed. The ambiguities, the complicities with the occult powers, the commitment of the bishops and frontier priests. The alleged religiosity flaunted by the bosses and the decisive, but often late, response of a small number of churchmen. Until arriving decades later, at the turning point of Pope francesco and his excommunication to the mafia.
The film documents the overturning of the church in Palermo, with the strong words of Cardinal Pappalardo which mark the change of pace. And only forty-two years ago the homily on “Sagunto” arrived at the prefect’s funeral Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro.
The cardinal’s public statements explode against the mafia and Pappalardo openly declares the change, even if his voice will remain isolated for too long. Few bishops wanted to listen to him. The germ of an anti-mafia movement was strengthened on 9 May 1993 when Pope John Paul II it is in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento.
His robe is a white stain on burnt and harsh tones. He concludes the homily by thundering against the mafiosi. In an Italian who becomes uncertain due to his oratorical passion, brandishing and at the same time almost leaning on an enormous crucifix, his appeal culminates in a severe cry: «I say to those in charge: convert. Once the judgment of God will come.” His anathema against the mafiosi causes a great stir. Bellia and La Licata’s film shows very well that there have been few priests as fathers Pino Puglisi, killed by the mafia in Palermo in September 1993. And this is not a matter of heroism. Gregorio Porcaro explains it with great emotional transport and as an eyewitness that he was at the side of this priest murdered by the Graviano bosses.
However, when the mafia leaders were arrested and tried for that crime, the church missed another opportunity, that of taking a civil action. She stayed out of it, as if that judicial fact didn’t belong to her. And then Pope Francis arrives with his excommunication of the mafiosi. A radical change that makes the mafias understand that they can no longer find an ally in the Church, and in religious rites they can no longer have a front row seat under the statues of the saints.
The interpretation of Pippo Delbono which stitches together all these stories, takes us into little-explored worlds made of rituals and connivances. The events of the last century are retraced, the episodes that saw priests and religious victims of mafia violence are dramatically unraveled, and it is also shown how, in the South, the Church has not always been a courageous bearer of messages of faith. And so Pietro Grasso and Roberto Scarpinato, Don Luigi Ciotti and the Archbishop of Palermo Corrado Lorefice, Bishop Michele Pennisi and Father Cosimo Scordato, Alessandra Dino and Leoluca Orlando, lead us into the complex and ambiguous relationship between priests and mafiosi and the turning point of Today.
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– 2024-03-29 09:53:03
