Vatican, 21 August, 2023 / 12:13 pm (ACI Africa).
Blessed Giuseppe “Don Pino” Puglisi “went all the way in love,” Pope Francis said in a letter published ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Sicilian priest’s death at the hands of the Mafia.
The blessed was shot and martyred by hitmen under the direction of the Sicilian Mafia group Cosa Nostra on Sept. 15, 1993, his 53rd birthday. Despite threats to his life, for years the priest had quietly fought organized crime through the education of young people in his parish’s poor Palermo neighborhood.
“Following the example of Jesus, Don Pino went all the way in love,” Pope Francis wrote in a letter to Archbishop Corrado Lorefice of Palermo, published Aug. 20.
The priest, he continued, “possessed the same traits of the meek and humble ‘good shepherd’: His boys, whom he knew one by one, are the testimony of a man of God who favored the small and defenseless, educated them to freedom, to love life and to respect it.”
In his letter, the pope addressed the priests of Sicily, a southern island region of Italy, and encouraged them “not to stop in the face of the many human and social plagues of the present hour, which still bleed and need to be healed with the oil of consolation and the balm of compassion.”