The relics of the anti-mafia martyrs: between civil religion and ecclesiastical initiative (1990-2023)

Abstract

Devotional imagery is an integral part of the mafia's symbolic universe: think, for example, of the role of devotional images in initiation rites or the management of patron saint cults by organised crime. From the 1990s onwards, some dioceses in southern Italy began to react to the Mafia's interference in religious life by promoting, from below, the beatification of martyrs such as the priests Pino Puglisi and Peppe Diana or the judge Rosario Livatino, who paid with their lives for opposing the power of Cosa Nostra or the Camorra. Hagiographic proposals that fulfil several functions: to redefine the boundary between legality and illegality within a Church that has sometimes been impermeable to mafia culture; to create a new model of Catholic priest or layman with the intention of removing parts of the territory from the influence of the clans; to 178 insert 'heroes of the faith' into the wider pantheon of mafia victims. This article aims to analyse the contradictory results of the cult of relics in the process of contamination between traditional forms of devotion and the new civil religion of the anti-mafia, also in its media and narrative aspects.