A good man passes

[fpb]

Cardinal Salvatore Pappalardo, Archbishop emeritus of Palermo, has died at 88. To people of my country and generation, this man stands for a time not to be forgotten: the time when, in the middle of terrible shocks and difficulties, Sicily and all Italy began to turn the corner in the struggle against the Mafia - accepting that it was a struggle, accepting that there was nothing inevitable about the Mafia, and accepting that it could be defeated. Cardinal Pappalardo himself was a Sicilian of the Sicilians in everything, beginning with his name - a name simply impossible this side of the Straits. And that was exactly the immensely important point. That a man with his name, his accent, his character - Sicilian to the point of stereotype - should assail the power of crime Sunday after Sunday, in and out of season, and should take powerful, practical steps to defy it, made an enormous impact on both sides of the Straits of Messina. Where previous archbishops had been at best accepting and at worst cooperating with the Mafia - in the name of the fatalistic belief that it could not be uprooted from Sicilian soil - Pappalardo was the first public figure to defy it and denounce it. His omilies and speeches became famous, and the younger generation of politicians and judges that arose in Sicily in the eighties, no longer in collaboration with, but in open revolt against, armed crime, all owned him as an example and master. I have no idea where he stood in the great internal issues of the Church with which I am personally very concerned, but his role in the history of Italy is, as far as I know, wholly positive. In fact, one is tempted to draw a parallel with the death of another famous old man who passed away in a Chilean military hospital at roughly the same time as Cardinal Pappalardo died in his monastic retreat... but why be unkind? God rest his soul and bring Him to everlasting light.

Comments

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

There is nothing inevitable about the Mafia?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am sorry to have to tell an American this, but we owe the modern incarnation of the Mafia to our American friends. In the early 1920s, the Sicilian Mafia was silenced and driven underground by the legendary police chief (Prefetto) Mori. Though appointed by a pre-Fascist government, the Fascists took care to support him and his achievements and in general kept the Mafia pretty well crushed. In the US, on the other hand, the Sicilian secret society had prospered, thanks to two main reasons - prohibition, and the existence of vast and corrupt city party machines. (I rather suspect that first contact with these in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when Irish party machines had established their hold over the largest American cities and Italian immigrants were following, helped turn primitive Sicilian banditry into the system of political control and mass extortion known as the Mafia.) So, in 1943, American agents, suffering from the eternal twin American delusions that, one, the end justifies the means, and, two, that being a bastard equals being effective, had a bright idea. They went and had some chats with Lucky Luciano, who, being at the time a long-term guest of Uncle Sam, was in no position not to listen, and offered him a deal he would not refuse even if he could. You help our soldiers in the planned invasion of Sicily, and we'll let you take residence in Italy - which you never should have left - and not in a jail either. As a result, the Mafia rose from being a minor problem to becoming, in the dreadful five years from 1943 to 1948, a virtual government of most of Sicily. That is what Italy has been suffering from ever since. Until the seventies, the State was not strong enough to mount a serious counter-offensive, but since then the Mafia has been on the back foot. To give you one instance of how things have changed: Lucky Luciano died in Naples in 1960 with every refinement of degeneracy - riddled with VD, yet in the hands of a prostitute - he was given a virtual state funeral, with the Archbishop saying mass, and nobody found it strange. Forty-five years later, the current Boss of All Bosses, Gaetano Badalamenti, was found by the police and arrested. As soon as the word spread, people gathered from all over the neighbourhood and started shouting insults and abuse at him. This is a scene that would not have been conceivable forty years ago. The influence of Cardinal Pappalardo in this historic change has been great.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Well, that's really interesting! Write more about the mob!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Understand, even without the idiotic American intervention (one of a whole series of catastrophic decisions taken during WWII and afterwards, which damaged relationships with Europe for ever), it is likely enough that the Mafia, kept down by the military power of the Fascist state, would have raised its head during the last couple of years of war, with the Italian state reduced to a shadow and civil war and German occupation in much of the country. But the Americans all but legitimated the Mafia, which therefore had a much easier life. At the time of Mori, hundreds of mafiosi had fled Sicily for America; now a lot of them - beginning with Lucky Luciano, an illegal immigrant if I remember correctly - came back, with all the know-how and capital they had accumulated in the States.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Tell me more about American intervention, the kind you call "idiotic."