Blessed Pino Puglisi, Priest of Palermo Killed by the Mafia

Who was Blessed Pino Puglisi?

Blessed Pino Puglisi was a parish priest of Palermo who was murdered by the Mafia on his fifty-sixth birthday. Everyone called him Don Pino, or "3P," for Padre Pino Puglisi. Born in the poor district of Brancaccio, he came back to it as pastor in 1990 and set about taking its children, one by one, out of the hands of the local bosses: with catechism and the sacraments, with a center where they could study and play, and with sermons that named the evil plainly. On the evening of September 15, 1993, two gunmen waited for him at his front door. He smiled at them and said, "Me lo aspettavo," "I was expecting this."

The Church beatified him as a martyr in 2013. The day after, Pope Francis said that "in teaching boys in accordance with the Gospel he saved them from the criminal underworld," and that although the Mafia killed him, "in fact it is he who won, with the Risen Christ."

The life of Blessed Pino Puglisi

A shoemaker's son from Brancaccio

Giuseppe Puglisi was born in Brancaccio on September 15, 1937, the son of Carmelo Puglisi, a shoemaker, and Giuseppa Fana, a seamstress. He entered the seminary of Palermo in 1953 and was ordained a priest on July 2, 1960.

For thirty years he served wherever the archbishop sent him: as assistant pastor in Settecannoli and Valdesi, chaplain to an orphanage for workers' children, vice-rector of the minor seminary, director of the diocesan and then the regional vocations center, religion teacher in the schools, spiritual director at the major seminary, and guide to Catholic Action, the Catholic university students and young married couples. He called himself a rompiscatole, a pest, who would not leave people comfortable in a half-lived faith.

Eight years in Godrano

From 1970 to 1978 he was pastor of Godrano, a small mountain town in the province of Palermo divided by a long and bloody feud between families. With patient preaching and charity he brought the families to reconcile and forgive one another, and the killings ended.

Pastor of his own neighborhood

On September 29, 1990, he was named pastor of San Gaetano in Brancaccio. Besides the ordinary life of the parish, he organized popular missions, courses in basic theology and in reading and writing, and training for volunteers. With the Sisters of the Poor of St. Catherine of Siena he opened the Padre Nostro Center in January 1993 for neglected children and young people, the easy recruits of the Mafia. He pressed the city to give the district a middle school, a small clinic and a library.

He chose the name "Our Father" on purpose. The Mafia offered the boys of Brancaccio a false father, a padrino. Father Pino wanted them to know the Father who loves everyone. "If everyone does something, a great deal can be done," he liked to say. The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints insists that he was "essentially and only a priest," not an "anti-Mafia" activist, and that his work came from pastoral charity.

"I was expecting this"

Threats followed: warnings, firebombs, burned doors, beatings. He did not back down. "I am not afraid of the words of the violent," he preached, "but of the silence of the honest" (our translation). Knowing that he was in danger, he became more discreet, to keep his parishioners out of harm's way.

On the evening of September 15, 1993, his birthday, he was coming home when two men hired by a Mafia clan stopped him at his door. One held a pistol to the back of his head. Father Pino smiled and said, "I was expecting this." He was shot dead. The man who fired, Salvatore Grigoli, later confessed and said there had been "a kind of light in that smile." Grigoli and another of the killers, Gaspare Spatuzza, later underwent a conversion, and both credited it to the priest they had killed, sure that he had forgiven them.

Beatification as a martyr

The Church examined his death and judged it a martyrdom in hatred of the faith: the Mafia killed him to stop the faith-driven work of a priest. He was beatified in Palermo on May 25, 2013. As a martyr he was beatified without an approved miracle; graces people report through his prayers remain reported until one is examined for his canonization. Pope Francis came to Palermo on September 15, 2018, the twenty-fifth anniversary, and celebrated Mass on his memorial. "One cannot believe in God and be a mafioso," the pope said.

Symbols of Blessed Pino in art

Images of Father Pino follow his photographs: a short, balding priest with large ears, of which he liked to joke, and a wide smile, the smile his killer could not forget. He is often shown among children from Brancaccio, in a simple clerical shirt or with a stole, and with the palm of martyrdom.

Feast day and where he is honored

We keep his memory on September 15, the day of his birth and of his death, as Pope Francis did at Palermo in 2018. Santi e Beati lists October 21, the anniversary of his baptism, as his liturgical memorial. His tomb is in Palermo Cathedral, where it bears the words of Jesus: "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). See our feast days calendar for other saints of September.

Praying with Blessed Pino Puglisi

We have not found an approved English prayer to Blessed Pino Puglisi, so we do not print one. Pope Francis gave us words for the prayer: "Let us pray that these members of the Mafia be converted to God."

Let us ask Blessed Pino Puglisi to pray for children growing up in poor and violent neighborhoods, for parish priests, for the conversion of those caught up in organized crime, and for the courage of honest people who are tempted to stay silent.