Catholics believe that the pope has the privilege of infallibility, meaning that his doctrine on matters of faith or morals cannot be challenged. Yet there is one point on which the line dictated by Pope Francis, who died on April 21, has not been transformed into binding conduct for the church hierarchies: the excommunication of mobsters. If the late pope’s opposition to organized crime had been implemented as an edict, it would have banished organized crime bosses from the Catholic community and stopped them from using religion to legitimize their power.
The Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra have always used Christian symbols and values as tools to define their identity and consolidate authority over the population. Traditionally, Palermo mobsters trace their origins to the Beati Paoli religious confraternity that protected the weak during the 19th century. The affiliation ceremonies that seal entry into the criminal association always have a reference to faith, such as the use of holy cards adorned with a saint’s image and a drop of blood. The card is burned when a newly inducted member swears an oath of allegiance to the leader, who is referred to as the “padrino,” or godfather.
These ceremonies and hierarchies are not exclusive to Italians or Catholics; they have been adopted by narcos and mafiosi from Mexico, South America, Russia and the Balkans. Yet they have found their greatest expression in southern Italy. Even today, the leaders of the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta meet at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi to make major decisions. In religious street festivals, when the statue of the Virgin Mary or patron saint is carried in procession through the crowds on the streets of a town or neighborhood, the boss used to take charge of paying for light displays, fireworks and marching bands and walk immediately behind the priest.
Today, the police prevent organized crime families from participating in religious processions and make sure that the bearers of the statue do not turn and tip it so that it appears to “bow” in tribute when they pass the godfather’s house. For the organized crime clans, the purpose of participating in the processions and of causing the statue to bow to the godfather’s house is to increase the population’s respect for the clan, boosting the “consenso,” or implicit support for the boss’s activities, even from people who are not directly involved in them. Out of this implicit support evolves omerta, the code of silence, which imposes a taboo on reporting crimes to the police or acting as a witness to crimes committed by the clan. This, along with violence, is the cornerstone of Mafia control over territory.
For many years, the clergy tolerated or even supported the presence of organized crime. In the early part of the 20th century, these so-called “men of honor” were believed to maintain law and order more effectively than state institutions, preventing theft, robbery and violence; they exercised a form of justice and subsidized religious ceremonies. After World War II, the Mafia was also legitimized by priests and bishops as a curb on communism, fostering relationships on the ground that boosted the electoral successes of Christian Democracy, the Catholic party that remained in government continuously from 1948 to 1994. The last “capo dei capi” (supreme mob boss) of Cosa Nostra was the ruthless Totò Riina, who was responsible for hundreds of murders. During his many years as a fugitive from the law, he was married by a priest and had his four children baptized. Riina died in prison in 2017.
From the 1970s, the Vatican and Mafia-linked figures were in direct contact, primarily in banking. Cardinal Paul Marcinkus, an American who headed the Vatican’s bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), famously said, “You can’t run the church on Hail Marys.” Marcinkus meant that the Holy See’s overheads now required large sums of money, which is why he turned the IOR into a bank devoted to unscrupulous speculation, with the opacity typical of offshore lending institutions. Under his stewardship, the IOR engaged in international financial ventures with the Italian bankers Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona. The latter had owned Banca Privata Italiana since 1961, and he also controlled Franklin National Bank in the United States from 1974, in addition to a network of financial companies around the world. He had connections with the Gambino Mafia family in New York and the Mafia in Palermo. Calvi was the head of Banco Ambrosiano, which maintained relations with Cosa Nostra and the Camorra. Relations between the church and these mob-linked bankers inspired the third instalment of “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s film trilogy on the Mafia.
After his credit institution went bankrupt, Sindona, who was widely believed to be the custodian of the Sicilian and American mob’s capital, ordered the assassination of the official whom the state had appointed to administer his bank. The assassin, who was hired in the U.S., carried out the execution in downtown Milan in 1979. In March 1986, after a Milan court sentenced him to life in prison for hiring the assassin, Sindona slipped into a coma and died two days later. The coroner found cyanide in Sindona’s system, determined as the cause of his death. At the time he ingested the cyanide, Sindona was under constant guard in a specially constructed wing of a prison in Voghera, where guards delivered his food in sealed containers. Despite this, the investigating magistrate still ruled that his death was suicide.
Calvi, whom the press called “God’s banker” for his Vatican connection, was found hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. He was 62 years old. In the early 1990s, a number of reformed prominent Sicilian and Neapolitan mafiosi, as well as former members of the Roman criminal group Banda della Magliana, became whistleblowers and cooperated with the magistrates, reconstructing their relations with Calvi and confirming that he had been murdered because the bankruptcy of his institution had caused the criminal clans to lose huge amounts of capital.
In 2002, two decades after Calvo’s body was found hanging in London, an Italian court found that the banker had indeed been murdered. Three years later, in 2005, five people, including a jailed Mafia boss, were put on trial for the crime, though they were not convicted. During the trial, Bishop Pavol Hnilica admitted that he had tried to buy the briefcase Calvi was carrying at the time of his death; he wanted to prevent documents on his relations with the Vatican from being revealed, in particular on the banker’s financing of the Polish anti-communist Solidarity movement, a cause that was important to St. John Paul II, pope from 1978 to 2005.
During the same period in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the Banda della Magliana had acted as a point of contact for the Mafia top brass, maintaining relations with senior Vatican prelates amid blackmail and money laundering. The gang had gained control of the underworld in the city of Rome, running everything from moneylending to the drug trade to high-level prostitution. Court documents showed that cardinals had had business dealings with them, meeting them in restaurants and private gatherings. Others entered their brothels — an illegal activity in Italy — and religious bodies managed real estate speculations with the men of the clan. The leader of the group was murdered but was buried inside a Renaissance church in the center of Rome.
From the 1980s, however, several priests in Sicily, including the cardinal of Palermo, changed their position on the Mafia. They condemned their crimes and involvement in drug trafficking. Italians were shocked when, in 1992, the Mafia murdered Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, well-known magistrates who had devoted their careers to prosecuting and overthrowing the Mafia.
Falcone and Borsellino were very popular figures in Italy. Their investigations into organized crime made it possible for the first time to have the Sicilian Cosa Nostra recognized in trials as a Mafia association on the basis of an offense under the Italian penal code, and all members were sentenced to prison. Their methodology, which was predicated on the search for the bosses’ money, per the maxim “follow the money,” became a worldwide benchmark. Falcone also introduced a specialized police force, the Anti-Mafia Investigation Division (DIA), and a network of investigating magistrates dealing exclusively with the matter. Falcone was assassinated, together with his wife and three bodyguards, on May 23, 1992, by a bomb that destroyed a section of the motorway between Palermo airport and the city. Borsellino was killed, together with five police officers, by a car bomb on July 20 of the same year.
These events marked a turning point for the Vatican. On May 9, 1993, during a Mass celebrated in front of the Greek temples in the ancient Sicilian city of Agrigento, John Paul called for “a clear reprobation of the culture of the Mafia, which is a culture of death, profoundly inhuman, anti-evangelical.” Addressing the crowd, the pope issued an unprecedented warning: “Do not kill,” he said. “No man, no human association, no Mafia can change and trample on the right to life, this most holy right of God.” He continued: “This people, Sicilian people, so attached to life, people who love life, who give life, cannot live always under the pressure of an opposing civilization, civilization of death. We need a civilization of life here! In the name of this Christ, crucified and resurrected, this Christ who is life, I say to those in charge: Convert! God’s judgment will come once!”
John Paul’s “cry of Agrigento” was a watershed moment. The Cosa Nostra clearly saw that the pope’s sermon posed a danger to the foundation of its power and authority: In July 1993, a car bomb exploded late one night outside the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, the residence of the Holy See, devastating its facade. A few months later, Don Pino Puglisi, a parish priest in the working-class Palermo neighborhood of Brancaccio who had spoken out against the Mafia, was assassinated. But the church did not reconsider its condemnation of the Mafia: In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI made Puglisi the first “Mafia martyr” by declaring him beatified, a step in the process toward canonization.
Francis was even more determined than his predecessors: He insisted on “the total irreconcilability between any criminal organization, Mafia, Camorra or ‘ndrangheta, and the Gospel.” On June 21, 2014, giving a sermon to thousands of faithful in Calabria, Francis took another step forward. “When the worship of the Lord is substituted for the worship of money, one opens the way to sin, self-interest and oppression; when one does not worship God, the Lord, one becomes a worshipper of evil, as those are who live by malfeasance and violence,” he preached. The pope continued: “The ‘ndrangheta is this: worship of evil and contempt for the common good. This evil must be fought, it must be driven away! It must be told ‘No!’ Those who in their lives follow this path of evil, as mafiosi do, are not in communion with God: They are excommunicated!”
Francis evoked the church’s most drastic tool — excommunication. If they are excommunicated from the church, mafiosi cannot receive the sacraments and are permanently exiled from the Catholic community. But the pontiff did not want to limit himself to making a plea; his goal was to establish the rules for the excommunication of mob bosses, so that canon law, the laws that regulate the life of the church, would be modified.
In the offices overlooking St. Peter’s Basilica, however, Francis’ request went unanswered: Several dicasteries — the Vatican’s equivalent of ministries — were activated, with the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, created by Francis, taking the leading role. Cardinal Peter Turkson was then prefect of the dicastery; the Ghanaian cleric had been one of Francis’ most trusted collaborators since the day of his election and contributed to the drafting of the encyclical “Laudato Si,” the most important social text of his pontificate. He was installed at the head of the dicastery precisely to make a breakthrough on these issues. But on the question of the Mafia, there were long debates, without arriving at a text. Vittorio Alberti, now a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and already involved in the discussions at that stage, described a climate of hostility: “The first brakes against the establishment of a working group,” he told New Lines, “were manifested immediately.” In Vatican dynamics no one ever dares to openly oppose the decisions of the pope — who has powers of absolute sovereignty — but the bodies that oversee the life of the church can obstruct by bureaucratic means, exploiting the nature of institutions that have ancient and slow procedures.
Increasing resistance was Francis’ willingness to excommunicate not only mobsters but also those engaged in corruption, which was another evil of contemporary society he denounced repeatedly in his homilies and texts.
The Mafia families have evolved over the last 20 years. In order to avoid provoking state institutions and society in general, they now prefer corruption to threats and violence. One illustration of this change is the fact that the number of murders committed by organized crime has plummeted drastically in Italy over the last two decades. Trials relating to the management of municipal contracts in the cities of Rome, Palermo and Naples have shown how bosses obtained contracts through the payment of bribes to politicians and municipal officials. Moreover, in the southern regions the mafiosi have taken control of numerous health facilities staffed by the regional administration, conditioning contracts, recruitment and careers. Medical assistance in Italy is free at all levels and represents the most important item of public expenditure. “The Holy See follows a millenarian doctrine in which these issues are not addressed,” Alberti explained, adding, “There is very little on corruption and nothing on the Mafia.”
Despite the pope’s will, changing this doctrine, which takes into account decisions that the popes and the church formulated over the centuries, is not easy: It requires numerous procedural steps by various church bodies. Within the Vatican, there has been strong resistance to Francis’ choices on other ethical or social issues, for example on giving the sacraments to homosexuals and divorcees or the role of women in the church. In some cases, disagreements have led to open criticism by cardinals and senior prelates. In the case of the excommunication of mafiosi and corrupt persons, the opposition was more fluid. Doubts were consolidated by those who did not consider the issue relevant, those who thought it was not a matter for the church and those who instead looked with concern at the repercussions of an unprecedented action on the image and security of the clergy.
There was a long lull in Vatican procedure, which was interrupted in May 2021 by another initiative from Francis: He beatified the Sicilian magistrate Rosario Livatino, who was killed in an ambush in 1990, and established a working group to revitalize the issue of excommunication. This time, he limited it to mobsters. The pope appointed nine people to the working group, both laypeople and priests, who were given the task of raising awareness on the matter within the Catholic world, drafting a proposal for legislation and initiatives in different countries. He assigned the position of coordinator to Alberti, who encountered obstacles from members of the Vatican dicasteries that went beyond all expectations. Some members of the working group said that the climate of hostility gradually became surreal: The Holy See even denied them access to meeting rooms, while representatives of the departments deserted them, always making excuses. Nevertheless, the group did manage to create a final document. Alberti said it contained proposals for how to create “a norm of canon law for excommunication” as well as ideas for anti-Mafia education programs in schools and prisons and for diplomatic action for the Vatican Secretariat of State to undertake. The point, Alberti said, was to engage in “dialogue, cultural and social action.” But the group was denied a meeting with Francis to discuss the document. Nothing about its content reached the ears of the public.
In July 2023, the French Catholic newspaper La Croix, considered progressive, denounced the cover-up of the report. The article quoted Monsignor Michele Pennisi, who said that Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Canadian Jesuit priest newly appointed head of the dicastery, had told him that the Mafia was an Italian issue. Cardinal Czerny was deemed a progressive who was attentive to social issues and extremely close to Francis. But he believed the Vatican needed to focus on other priorities, most notably peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. As an Italian problem, Czerny saw the Mafia as the responsibility of the national bishops’ conference rather than the Holy See.
As early as 2010, the Italian bishops were espousing a tough line against organized crime bosses. In a document titled “For a Country in Solidarity: The Italian Church and the Mezzogiorno (Southern Italy),” the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) wrote: “Mafias are the most dramatic configuration of evil and sin.” Many have denied Mafia bosses religious funerals or prevented them from serving as godfathers in baptisms and confirmations. But the CEI has the power neither to decree excommunication nor to change the universal rules of the church.
Monsignor Pennisi told La Repubblica, one of Italy’s most respected newspapers, that Czerny’s decision was “a missed opportunity” to deal with organized crime, which he pointed out was a global problem, not limited to Italy. But Francis, he said, was still concerned about the Mafia issue. In December 2023, the pope wrote in a message sent to Lumsa University in Rome during a conference in memory of Don Pino Puglisi, celebrating 30 years since the martyrdom of the priest killed by the Mafia in Palermo in 1993: “The church will never tire of forcefully reiterating that those who in their lives follow this path of evil, as mafiosi do, are not in communion with God: They are excommunicated!”
There were several reasons underlying Francis’ failure to push through a Vatican-led condemnation of the Mafia. There were legal problems in defining who or what the Mafia is: Only the Italian penal code provides for the crime of Mafia association. Some in the church feared that parishes and priests in Mafia-controlled areas would be attacked. And there was an unspoken fear that scandals might emerge over the collusion of priests or ecclesiastical structures. There were those in the church who feared that a decision as strong as excommunication would provoke a wave of revelations about relations between mafiosi and narcos not only with Italian clergy but also with the clergy in Central and South America or Africa. The jealousies and rivalries between various dicasteries certainly played an additional role. The result was a wall of refusal even more solid than the one that was erected to prevent the pope from issuing a denunciation of pedophilia among the clergy.
Alberti told New Lines that “cardinals, monsignors, various priests of the Roman Curia: even those appointed by Francis, the so-called ‘progressives,’ blocked the path toward excommunication of the mobsters.”
Now Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pope, will have to determine the church’s position. In Peru, as a missionary and as bishop of the city of Chiclayo — where cocaine trafficking is on the rise — he consistently denounced the corruption of the powerful and violence against the weak. But it is not yet clear to what extent his pontificate will follow Francis’ revolution.
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