AGRIGENTO – The blue shirt stained with blood, pierced by the bullets of the Mafia assassins is in a reliquary in the cathedral, a silver reliquary that commemorates his martyrdom. From today Rosario Livatino, a young judge who was murdered while, alone, without an escort, on the morning of 21 September 1990 he went to court, is Blessed. Martyr slain by stiddari killers who ran after him as he tried to escape along an escarpment and had no mercy on him. “Picciotti, what have I done to you?” He would have said to his killers before falling to the ground. A fate that he had long ago accepted as the price to pay for the life he had chosen.
A “credible” man defines him Monsignor Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints who came from Rome to officiate the beatification ceremony. A word echoed several times during the homily pronounced in a church for the Covid emergency open to very few people. “Credible”, an adjective that, in the midst of yet another storm that hit the Italian judiciary, sounds like a warning.
«Credibility was for him full consistency and invincible between Christian faith and life. Livatino claimed, in fact, the fundamental unity of the person; a unity that is valid and asserts itself in every sphere of life: personal and social. – recalls the cardinal – Livatino lived this unity as a Christian, to the point of convincing his opponents that the only possibility they had to kill the judge was to kill the Christian. This is why the Church honors him today as a martyr ”.
The diocesan postulator of the cause of beatification, Don Giuseppe Livatino, he “studied” his life for seven years. A necessary analysis for the canonical process passed for the reading of the magistrate’s writings and for listening to colleagues and family members. A study of over 4 thousand pages that also collected the testimony of the repentant killer of Livatino, Gaetano Puzzangaro who agreed to speak in the canonization process “because it was a duty,” he said.
Magistrate deemed unapproachable aeven for the rigor of his faith, Livatino instructed the first maxi-trial to the gangs of Agrigento, then he chose to pass to the judge. Intransigent, reserved, “he understood the importance of pool work and the effectiveness of patrimonial measures against the clans”, recalls the national anti-mafia prosecutor Cafiero de Raho, one of the magistrates present at the ceremony.
«From now on be called blessed and, every year, his feast may be celebrated on October 29 ”, the solemn formula of the proclamation which arrives on the day of an important anniversary. Twenty-eight years ago from the Valley of the Temples, a short distance as the crow flies from that cathedral that now houses the relics of the martyr magistrate, Pope John Paul II launched his historic curse against the mafia just after meeting Livatino’s parents the boy judge “an example for everyone,” says Piero Grasso, former head of the National Anti-Mafia Directorate present at the ceremony.
And the Sicilian bishops also speak of an example to inspire life in a harsh letter written on the eve of the beatification ceremony. «We are not yet equal to our martyrs. – they say – In these thirty years, many things have changed, but they haven’t changed enough yet. The mafia has found other ways to infiltrate. We must therefore raise our voices and join the words with the facts. Not with extemporaneous initiatives, but with systematic actions ». A sign that even in the Church there is still a long way to go.