Blessed Giuseppe Puglisi

Giuseppe Puglisi — Don Pino to everyone — was born in Brancaccio, on the outskirts of Palermo, on September 15, 1937. His father was a shoemaker, his mother a seamstress. He was a priest, a teacher and above all an educator. In 1990 he was sent as parish priest to Brancaccio itself, the neighborhood where he was born: a place in the hands of the Graviano brothers, where there was no middle school, no decent sewers, no fields for kids to play on. He did two things, and neither of them was a sermon. He opened the Padre Nostro center, to get children off the street. And he began to demand publicly from the State what that neighborhood was owed: the middle school, services, a family health clinic. He refused the money the bosses offered for the patron saint festivals, and he said in church, naming names, that he didn’t want that money. He was threatened for months: phone calls, doors set on fire, people waiting for him outside his home. He didn’t ask for protection and he didn’t leave. They killed him with a shot to the back of the head on the evening of September 15, 1993, outside his home, on his fifty-sixth birthday. The killer, Salvatore Grigoli, has said that Don Pino turned, smiled and said: “I was expecting this.” He was beatified on May 25, 2013, in Palermo, before a hundred thousand people. He is the first victim of the Mafia recognized by the Church as a martyr. If your name is Joseph, today is your name day.