The Mafia and Catholicism

The similarities may surprise you.

How piously Catholic are the Mafia? This seems like a very silly question. The Mafia are engaged in extortion and intimidation and far worse, and have been repeatedly condemned by the Church. Popes have made the pilgrimage south to Sicily and spoken plainly about the Mafia. One of the most famous interventions was that of Saint John Paul II in off the cuff words at the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento in 1993.

I translate into English as follows: ‘This people, the people of Sicily, a people so attached to life, a people who love life, who give life, cannot live under the yoke of a contrary civilisation, the civilisation of death. I say to those who are responsible, convert to avoid the judgement of God.’

It is not known how many Mafiosi took these words to heart, but one thing is for sure: you would have to be a very subtle Mafia man to think that this did not apply to you.

Despite this, the Mafia is, in a funny way, a very Catholic organisation. I mean, can you imagine any criminal organisation of Methodists, Presbyterians or even Anglicans? Of course not. The only religious grouping that has made any contribution to the literature of organised crime to rival that of the Catholics are of course our Jewish brethren, usually, one suspects for artists reasons alone, of the most frumm variety.

Bugsy Seigel: Jewish, but not particularly frumm.

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and the films he made with Francis Ford Coppola are soaked with the visual imagery of Catholicism. There is the famous baptism scene, where Michael is godfather to Connie’s child, while plotting the murder of the same child’s father, and while wiping out all his enemies. The splicing of religious scenes with violent whackings is a bit of a cliché, but it certainly works. It would not work so well if this were a post-Vatican II baptism. The Latin, the elaborate ceremonial, the repetition of the renunciation of the flesh, the world and the devil, are wonderfully ironic. Is that a statue of the Little Flower in the background? And what is that Cardinal doing there?

But the scenes don’t just underline Michael’s hypocrisy – that would be to make a rather crass, and to my mind, Protestant point. We are all hypocrites, after all, and pointing out that Michael Corleone is one too is hardly interesting. What the parallel between liturgy and murder does is something far more subtle: it’s highlighting not difference but similarity. The Mafia and the Church are both hierarchical organisations; the Mafia and the Church, particularly the Church of the pre-Conciliar era, share a ceremonial, ritualist and liturgical vision of life. Or to put it in a way that non-Catholics may more easily understand, the Mafia, like the Catholic Church, is obsessed with doing things properly, of everything being in the right place, of finding order in the world. The Mafia and the Church are both the repository of tradition.

Just as the Church’s liturgy is a way of bringing order to the perceived chaos of the world, the Mafia tries its best to make some sort of sense of the cruelty and disorder of life. Weddings, funerals, baptisms are major liturgical events, and major events for Mafiosi as well. The Mafia is strongly socially conservative, hence its opposition to Communism in Sicily after the Second World War. That way chaos lay.

Years ago I had a conversation with a wise Sicilian priest who told me that people in Sicily were very bad about going to Church, except in the Mafia dominated areas, where religious practice was high. I assume what this means is that in places like the famous town of Corleone, the women and children go to Mass, and the men stand outside the Church and smoke; those inside go to Communion, and to confession as well, but the men do not. How could they? They are, I assume atheists, but atheists who nevertheless support the Church as the foundation of the civilisation they have always known.

This is particularly seen in the matter of religious feasts. You may remember the scene in Little Italy where don Fanucci salutes the statue of Jesus (and I doubt he ever went to Mass).

Religious feasts are major events in Sicily, and these too have been tainted by the Mafia. There is a tradition of giving money to the Saint, or rather to finance the festivities, and large donors are honoured by the Saint’s procession passing by their houses and ‘thanking’ them with un saluto, an incline of the statue’s head. This becomes problematic when the major donor is a Mafioso, or someone under house arrest for dealings with with the Mafia.

Quite rightly, the Church objects to supposedly religious events being hijacked for the glorification of the Mafia. But the fundamental point is that these religious events are, for the vast majority, religious in name only. They are really a folkloristic expression of Sicilian culture – like the Mafia itself, one might say.

Don Fanucci, outwardly pious, but probably not a beleiver.

Catholicism came to Sicily in Roman times, and the Mafia many centuries later; Catholicism can claim a bimillennial tradition, but the Mafia cannot. Its traditionalism is essentially fake, as fake as don Fanucci’s piety. The Mafia is a parasitic growth on Sicilian culture and it has nothing to do with Catholicism per se – but the visual coincidences are stunning. And you can’t really understand the Mafia without being Catholic. And that is why, when you try to understand the Mafia, or more accurately Mafia literature, you need a Catholic priest like me to guide you.