Pope Francis is showing the Mafia who’s boss.
During Mass in crime-ravaged Calabria on Saturday, June 21, the Pope asserted that Mafiosi are “not in communion with God” and are “excommunicated.”
He also noted that mob families who attend Mass and adorn their homes with religious objects are still sinners, despite their external display of religious piety.
His words were met with applause by the approximately 250,000 in attendance, according to Catholic News. Due to unemployment rates and rampant poverty, Calabria has become the seat of the ‘Ndrangheta, one of the most powerful crime syndicates in Italy.
“This is what the ‘Ndrangheta is: the adoration of evil and contempt for the common good,” Pope Francis declared.
During his day-long trip to Calabria, Pope Francis also visited the Rosetta Sisca jail in southern Italy, where he called for prisons to offer better rehabilitation programs and for prisoners to use their time behind bars to reflect on the societal damage wrought by their misconduct. At the prison, he also met with the relatives of a three year old boy whose January murder, believed to be perpetrated by the Mafia, sent shock waves throughout Italy. (The relatives are being held in prison under drug-trafficking charges.)
The pope’s speech is one of the toughest censures of the Mafia in papal history and the first time that the word “excommunication” has been invoked by a pope to denounce Mafiosi, Reuters reports. Precedent was set by Pope John Paul II, whose sharp criticism of Mafiosi in 1993 triggered a string of Mafia-orchestrated Church bombings in Rome.
The current pontiff’s status as one of the Mafia’s staunchest critics was signaled back in March, when he became the first pope to attend an annual vigil for Mafia victims.
