THE lives of mafia victims, including Roman Catholic priests killed for denouncing organised crime, were commemorated across Italy, on 21 March.

“Good is not to be confused with evil — and it differs totally from lies,” the Archbishop of Turin, Cardinal Roberto Repole, said at an ecumenical service in his cathedral the previous day.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, who do everything so that mankind remains human and resists other forms of hunger and thirst — for money, power and revenge.”

Passion Sunday was observed as the 31st Day of Remembrance and Commitment for Innocent Victims of the Mafia. Nationwide, memorial marches were organised by Libera, a movement led Fr Luigi Ciotti, who remains under permanent police protection because of threats to his life.

The names of more than 1100 victims were read out. They were also the subject of an exhibition in the European Parliament, which was opened last month by the MEP, Caterina Chinnici, whose father, a magistrate, was killed by mafia hitmen.

Church leaders have often spoken out against organised crime in Italy. Last year, Italy’s law enforcement agency responsible for combating financial crime, tax evasion, smuggling, and drug trafficking, the Guardia di Finanza, brought 1351 police investigations, involving 5568 suspects.

In its report, the department said that mafia crime had assumed “an increasingly business character”, but was also closely linked to narcotics and involved three criminal syndicates, Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta, Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, and central Italy’s Camorra. Eighty per cent of attacks and killings by the mafia remain unsolved.

In October 2024, among several statements on organised crime, the late Pope Francis paid tribute to judges and officials killed by the mafia in a message to Palermo’s Pontifical Theology Academy, describing them as “true teachers of justice [in] a territory still dramatically marked by the scourge of the mafia”.

He also praised the dedication of six priests murdered by hitmen, including Fr Pino Puglisi, who was shot by the Cosa Nostra in 1993, and who became the first mafia victim to be beatified as a martyr, 20 years after his death.