There is no peace, not even in death, for Don Pino Puglisi. He continues, without stopping, the drip of damage to Brancaccio in the small square in Palermo where he was killed by the mafia with a cowardly gunshot to the back of the head on the evening of 15 September 1993, the day of his fifty-sixth birthday. This time the photographic exhibition set up to commemorate the visit that Pope Francis wanted to make in 2018 to the place where Salvatore Grigoli, a mafia killer with 46 murders on his conscience, killed by pretending to be a robber together with the boss Gaspare Spatuzza – also later collaborator of justice – who took his purse shouting: “Father, this is a robbery!”. A false threat in front of which Blessed Puglisi smiled and, knowing he was facing death, replied: “I expected it.” Of the commando who waited outside the house. The instigators were identified as the mafia leaders Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano who were sentenced to life in prison in 1994 also for this murder which rewrote the rules of the mafia which did not provide for the killing of priests. Spatuzza explained the reason for the murder both Grigoli, later a collaborator of justice, to the magistrates who interrogated him: «We killed him because he wore his picciriddi (children) cu iddu (with him)”. In fact, he took the kids away from the mafia logic and delivered them to a life of sweat and dignity instead of abuse. She did it with a smile. The same one that Grigoli explained like this: «There was a kind of light in that smile that had given me an immediate impulse. I can’t explain it: I had already killed several, but I had never experienced anything like this. I always remember that smile, even if I find it hard to even remember the faces, the faces of my relatives.”
The appeal
Then the appeal: «The cameras installed in the square, which we hope will give us the faces of the vandalsmust not replace the conscience of those who live and experience that square, therefore do not be afraid to make a phone call to the police, even anonymously, when you see vandals in action or about to vandalize a sacred place”.
Previous
The center has been subjected to acts of vandalism for over twenty years. On June 2, 2003, the door of the «Padre Nostro» center was walled up with rubble, leaving the tools near the door. A long trail of damage that did not stop even on the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his martyrdom. The lighting had just been restored in the small square when it was torn down for the umpteenth time a few hours before the national president of the anti-mafia commission Chiara Colosimo arrived to pay homage to the priest killed by the mafia on 15 September 1993. «These habitual vandals – Artale remembered – they broke a lantern that I had restored the day before the city council paid tribute, in that very place.”
