by Petra Reski
“I don’t suppose you want to have another chat with Padre Frittitta?” Salvo asks and laughs. I involuntarily stick out my little finger and my forefinger, to ward off evil. Everyone in Palermo knows the name of Padre Mario Frittitta. On one occasion Don Mario had been arrested for supporting the Mafia because he had heard fugitive Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri’s confession in his hiding place and had read him private masses. After the arrest of Padre Frittitta, his congregation had organized street demonstrations. Only four days later Padre Frittitta was released from the Ucciardone prison: a lenient judge had released him on condition that he leave Sicily. But even that punishment wouldn’t last for long: we met the Carmelite priest shortly after he returned to the bosom of his church amid the triumphant cries of his congregation.
There was quite a tense atmosphere around the meeting because Padre Frittitta no longer gave interviews to journalists. He had only agreed to talk to us because we had been recommended by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri.
It was a very hot day in October when we met Padre Frittitta. He was walking busily through his church. Against the light I could see his Carmelite habit slipping across the floor and swirling up dust. At first, the only sound was that of his crêpe soles squeaking across the marble—Padre Frittitta arranged a bouquet here, straightened an altar cloth there—until he greeted us very cordially and led us through his church, past the statues of the saints with their electric candles, past the church’s patron, St. Teresa of Avila, past Sant’Anna, Sant’Antonio, and Santa Rita—who actually had no business in this church, Padre Frittitta observed, but had been put here for the devotion of the little people, the lower classes, the popolino, Padre Frittitta sighed.
As Shobha prowled around the church taking pictures of the saints, I sat down on a pew beside Padre Frittitta and became aware that the church air was making me a bit dizzy. It smelled sweet and sour at the same time: it smelled of faded lilies, of muttered sins and stale air, of myrrh, of absolution, and of old men. I held the microphone of my tape recorder at arm’s length and Padre Frittitta said: “God is everywhere.”
He told me his favorite saint was Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity, because she had taught him that God dwells within us.
“God is in the mountains, in the sea and in the trees,” Padre Frittitta said. His voice sounded like whispering from hundreds of years ago, a hoarse susurration, a quiet murmur. “I don’t have to seek God in the clouds,” said Padre Frittitta, “because I carry him within me, and that is what gives me courage and strength. That’s what I always preach: ‘Take God with you wherever you go!’”
So Padre Frittitta had also brought the Lord God to the hiding place of the fugitive mafioso Pietro Aglieri. There, in front of the home altar, he had served the mass to the murderer, had taken his confession and granted him absolution. Since then, the law had investigated the Carmelite priest, and Padre Frittitta no longer understood the world. He spoke without waiting for a question, as if he had pressed a button deep within himself. The button of absolution.
Of course, Pietro Aglieri’s involvement in the assassinations of the two public prosecutors, Falcone and Borsellino, was a grave matter even in the eyes of Padre Frittitta, not to mention the thirteen other accusations of murder—involvement in the murders of general public prosecutor Antonino Scopelliti, the MP Salvo Lima, the sisters of the turncoat mafioso Marino Mannoia, and murders during the Mafia war in 1983. But still.
“However, it was right for me to go there,” Padre Frittitta whispered, “it was right, because Jesus preached: ‘Go out and bring back the lost sheep!’ So I went. Because this individual had to change. The church must help these people: they too have dignity; they too have a soul that shouldn’t be kicked and battered with laws. Laws, laws, of course, but to achieve what? What?”
As he spoke, his gaze slipped across the pews to the wooden crucifix, the crown of thorns, the wounds, to Jesus, his legs polished smooth by the hands of the faithful who touched him during the Easter processions. “And Jesus went to the sinners,” Padre Frittitta whispered. “Yes, he went to them, so I went to them too, and I knew that I was taking a risk.”
Fury sprayed from his mouth in fine droplets of saliva, incessant, dense, and sticky. After all, everyone in Palermo knew how devout the Aglieri family was. Her son believed in God, Pietro Aglieri’s mother herself had insisted; he wasn’t pretending, he respected the Christian commandments, and all the things that had been circulated about him were false. His sister lived in a closed order, his cousin was chaplain at the Palermo polyclinic, an aunt was a nun, and Pietro Aglieri himself had attended the archiepiscopal seminary in Palermo, where he had acquired his knowledge of Latin and Greek.
“These people must be saved,” whispered Padre Frittitta, “and it’s not prison that saves them, not solitary confinement, no. Certainly, they must make good their injustice, that’s one thing, but the other thing is surely to convert them. And that requires someone who will sow supernatural, moral values in them. And only the church can do that!”
Padre Frittitta groaned, as if he were living through it all again: the policeman arresting him, the dazzling flashlights as he was dragged from his church in handcuffs—all the humiliations, all the insults, all the indignities still lay heavy on his heart.
Then, on the evening news, the whole of Italy had been able to see the pictures of Pietro Aglieri’s hiding place with its little chapel, its prayer stools, the statue of Saint Francis, the Bible, the gospels, the books by Edith Stein, and the files of the Second Vatican Council, crumpled and scattered on the floor. The newspapers reported how after his arrest Pietro Aglieri had spent hours in solitary confinement immersed in prayer and said at last: “I have repented before God.” Which, admittedly, he said more to himself than to the policeman who had opened the door and asked with surprise: “You want to repent?” And Aglieri had replied: “Before God. Not before you.”
Padre Frittitta wouldn’t have expected anything else of him. Who cares about earthly justice?
It’s heavenly justice that Cosa Nostra hopes for. Earthly justice it creates itself. Trials can be fixed, judges and politicians bought. The turncoat mafioso Leonardo Messina said: “Of course my wife and I are religious. I was taught that the Mafia exists in order to administer justice. So there is no contradiction. On the contrary, it’s now that I feel like more of a traitor. Before, when I was a murderer, I was relaxed as I walked into the church. Now that I’m a turncoat I can no longer pray with a clear conscience.”
When Nitto Santapaola, the boss of the Catania Mafia family, was arrested, before the handcuffs were put on him he picked up the Bible and kissed it. And when the boss Michele Greco, known as il Papa, the Pope, was called to account for hundreds of murders at the maxi-trial, he merely remarked: “I have an invaluable gift—inner peace.” On the bedside table in his prison cell there were four books that he read to make his life sentence go by more quickly: the gospels, a prayer book entitled Pray, Pray, and two liturgical books.
The reference library of Mafia boss Totò Riina is very similar: he never sleeps without pictures of the saints at the head of his prison bed. And Bernardo Provenzano’s knowledge of the Bible is legendary. When he was arrested at the end of his forty-two years, eleven months, and two days in Corleone, the police found five Bibles with annotations and passages underlined. At his desk the boss surrounded himself with pictures of the saints, the Last Supper framed in dark wood, the Mother of God in various versions, a calendar with a picture of Padre Pio, the boss’s favorite saint. There was even a rosary in the bathroom. After Provenzano’s arrest, the police counted ninety-one sacred statues, seventy-three of them Christ figures with the inscription Jesus, I put my trust in you. No one was surprised that Provenzano’s messages, the pizzini, those little pieces of paper, folded and sealed with adhesive tape, with which he managed to remain invisible in the age of the Internet, bugs, and satellite surveillance, always ended with the same phrase: May the Lord bless and prot
ect you.
The messages to his followers, delivered in the solemn and affectionate tone of a good father, were typed up by Provenzano on a typewriter. When he was arrested, thirty little pieces of paper were ready to be collected and distributed to their addressees. The Provenzano code didn’t just consist of numbers—the boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo was no. 30, his son no. 31; only the boss Matteo Messina Denaro had the honor of being addressed by a code name, “Alessio”—but also his own personal, individual spelling: Provenzano wrote as he spoke, he confused t and d, g and c, in line with Sicilian dialect. But the lines of prayer and Bible quotations were by no means an expression of religious fanaticism; they were the vehicle of a secret code. When the boss Pino Lipari received a prison visit from his son Arturo, it concerned the content of the piece of paper that Arturo had copied down for his arrested father. The content had not been complete, his father complained. When his son justified himself by saying that there had been a lot of Ave Marias in the message, to which he hadn’t paid much attention, his father rebuked him: “Next time, copy out everything, because in the middle of all those Ave Marias there’s something that I need to understand, have you got that?”
The commandments of the church are the commandments of the Mafia. But for the Mafia the significance of the commandments is less ethical than practical. God exists in order to be useful to Cosa Nostra.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me: The boss is infallible, a padre eterno, God’s vicar on earth, master over life and death.
Honor thy father and thy mother: The preservation of the family goes above all else, even one’s own life. But only so long as individual family members don’t tread the dignity of a man of honor, the clan, or Cosa Nostra itself into the mud—a sister who has an extramarital affair that the whole town talks about has forfeited her life.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor: Mafiosi are obliged to be completely honest with one another. A man of honor never lies. Either he says nothing or he tells the truth, because his honesty is of crucial importance to the survival of Cosa Nostra.
Thou shalt not commit adultery: A mafioso may not deceive his wife: the mother of his children could become an unpredictable security risk if the extramarital relationship came to light. And a lover is often less easily tamed than a wife. Besides, a mafioso who is known to have affairs is seen as someone incapable of controlling himself sexually and emotionally, which means that he isn’t professionally trustworthy.
There is only one Christian commandment that has not been taken onboard by Cosa Nostra: Thou shalt not kill. But can a job be a sin? A man of honor kills without passion. For him, to kill is to fulfill one’s duty—to his state, his people, Cosa Nostra, which he is sworn to serve, since the all-powerful godfather said: “Now you no longer belong to this world. Now you are our business. Cosa Nostra.”
Do they have guilt feelings? “Does a judge have guilt feelings when he sentences a defendant to the electric chair or life imprisonment?” the turncoat mafioso Tommaso Buscetta once asked, and told the story of the mafioso who, before every murder, used to light a candle in front of the statue of Jesus and pray: “Jesus Christ, take him! Take him to you!” But God did not hear his plea. So the mafioso carried out the murder himself. After that he prayed again: “Dear God, you didn’t want him. I have sent him to you.” And before every murder the hit man Leoluca Bagarella went to church to pray: “Lord, you alone know that they are the ones who want to be killed. No guilt attaches to me.”
Since its origins, Cosa Nostra has tried to merge with the world in which it lives and from which it was born. That is crucial to its survival. The Mafia wants to be invisible; it wants to be part of society. It has always relied upon the Italian dislike of the state, and for centuries it has successfully sold the illusion of fighting for a higher justice—as if it were fighting for justice for the individual against a powerful state. This is something it has in common with the Catholic Church, which struggles to comply with the demands of earthly justice. In large parts of southern Italy the state is still seen as an occupying power—as if the Normans, the Hohenstaufen, the Bourbons, the Aragonese and Austrians had passed through here only yesterday.
As pragmatic as Cosa Nostra is, it would never dare call the church into question. Even in the third millennium, Italy is still a country where, every day, if not the Pope then at least one of his cardinals appears on television, addresses his subjects, and urges them to have more children, fewer divorces, to play more sport and use less homeopathic medicine.
The church fears for souls, the Mafia for its sinecure. And for that reason the Carmelite monks defended their fellow priest Padre Frittitta and instructed the public prosecutor’s office that the church was never against anything, not even Cosa Nostra, but only ever with: with the tormented souls, with every individual sinner who needed salvation. And Novica, a journal close to the Palermo curia, said this: “Even the most wanted mafioso in the world must be sure that at any time of day or night he can find a cleric who will hand him over neither to the public prosecutor’s office nor to police headquarters.”
“And through whose fault was Christ nailed to the cross?” whispered Padre Frittitta. “Through the fault of people who had sinned! Through the fault of us sinners! Should I have torn the passion story out of the gospels? Jesus is not only the Jesus of blessedness, but also the Jesus of the passion. That’s why I went.”
That’s what Padre Frittitta says. And I remember that at some point I lost all feeling in my arm. When I turned the tape recorder off I noticed a faint feeling of dizziness. The heat. The lilies. The incense. The smell of old men. Just before I reached the sacristy I fainted. When I woke up again I saw Padre Frittitta bending over me, rubbing a liquid that smelled like Melissa oil over my face, neck, and cleavage, and a deathly pale Shobha dashing in and yelling excitedly: “What’s going on here? What’s happened?” To which Padre Frittitta, bright red in the face, replied: “Nothing, nothing, nothing!”
Later, as I was washing my face with cold water, he asked Shobha in a whisper what state my faith was in. Shobha assured him that my faith was firmly rooted.
“Is she religious?” he persisted.
“Very religious,” said Shoba. “She would never miss a procession.”
When we were saying good-bye, Padre Frittitta offered us a peppermint each. I took one. Shobha turned hers down.
“You are a skeptic,” Padre Frittitta said reproachfully.
CORLEONE
PEOPLE NEED VALUES. EVEN MEN OF HONOR, WHO BELIEVE IN nothing but the power of Cosa Nostra, need a system to provide them with values and bring them into line. Every value system that strives for the absolute, regardless of whether it’s communism or the Catholic Church, gives its devotees not just a complete image of the world, a tight-fitting corset of rules and codes for good behavior, but an ideological foundation as well. The communists justify their thirst for power by leading people to freedom, to equality, to fraternity. To the victory of the proletariat, the eradication of capitalist oppression. The Catholic Church promises its believers salvation and eternal life. The Mafia, on the other hand, can give no metaphysical foundation for its thirst for power. It has no ideological foundation on which to build its system. That’s why it needs religion. Using the components of the Catholic faith, it has constructed God in its own image. The God of a tooth for a tooth. The God of the chosen people. The God who leveled Sodom and Gomorrah. A bloodthirsty God.
I was glad that a few days after my meeting with Padre Frittitta I was able to meet a cleric who had always spoken out against the close alliance between church and Mafia. The Sicilian Redemptorist padre Nino Fasullo bears the label of an “anti-Mafia priest,” because even today it isn’t obvious that anyone should be opposed to the Mafia. Not priests, not public prosecutors. “For a phenomenon like the Mafia, which has no intellectual justification at all, religion may represent the only ideological apparatus to which it can refer,” Padre Fasullo said. I met him in his ba
re office on the periphery of Palermo. He sat at his desk in a plain checked shirt, no habit, no aura of illumination, no incense.
“There isn’t a single mafioso who isn’t religious,” said Padre Fasullo, and his voice sounded agonized. All the articles he had written on the subject of church and Mafia! All the lectures he had given! Endless. He sighed.
“You know,” he said slowly, “the church is holy and sinful at the same time. It is clean and dirty, beautiful and ugly. We’re all in the church. Even the Mafia. Unfortunately. The church is embroiled in it. But regrettably not everyone in the church is convinced that opposition to the Mafia is necessary.”
What model is the anti-Mafia priest supposed to refer to when even the Archbishop of Monreale, the largest and wealthiest diocese in Sicily, had been up before the court for accepting bribes for the awarding of building contracts? Monreale has the highest Mafia density in Sicily. The diocese includes the little towns of Corleone and San Giuseppe Jato, Prizzi and Carini.
Padre Nino Fasullo despaired over all those pursed lips, the lowered eyes and closed ears of his colleagues. “So confession is no longer the sacrament of mercy and forgiveness, of freedom and courage, but the graveyard of morality?” he asked. And then he pointed out that hardly anything has changed since the 1960s—a time famous for a bon mot of the Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, who said: “Mafia? Isn’t that a brand of soap?” Ruffini played down the Mafia to Pope Paul VI as a quantité négligeable, a band of petty criminals invented by the left in order to discredit Sicily, the Christian Democrats, and the church. The only one who had delivered moral sermons, who had condemned the Mafia as the spawn of the devil and called upon mafiosi to convert, had been John Paul II.