Shots were fired Thursday night
against a centre named after an Italian priest gunned down by
the Camorra in 1994 in his home town near Caserta where the clan
that forced mafia writer Roberto Saviano into police protection
held sway.
The shots were fired at Don Diana's Home, named after Father
Peppino Diana, killed by the notorious Casalesi clan in their
fief of Casal di Principe.
Police said they had appeared to have been fired from another
which was once owned by a local mobster and is set to be turned
over to socially useful purposes.
Don Diana first started defying the Camorra, and the Casalesi,
In the mid-1980s, when he set up a welcome centre for African
immigrants in Campania to stop them from being recruited by the
Camorra in a direct challenge to their business practices.
At Christmas 1991, he published a letter urging his parishioners
to shun the Camorra. The letter entitled "For the love of my
people I will not stay silent", called on the church to resist
the Camorra's rule, which he called "a form of terrorism". He
also denounced the Casalesi clan's business practices:
"Extortion that has left our region with no potential for
development; kickbacks of 20 per cent on construction projects;
illegal drug trafficking, which has created gangs of
marginalised youth and unskilled workers at the beck and call of
criminal organisations."
In 1994 he testified in an investigation of ties linking the
Camorra, politicians and businessmen after the Government's
decision to suspend the local council in Casal Di Principe
because of its links to the Camorra.
He had threatened to stop administering sacraments to
camorristi, refusing to marry them. He also sided with the newly
elected mayor of Casal di Principe, who was trying to prevent
firms connected to the Camorra from tendering for public
contracts.
On March 19, 1994, he was shot twice in the head in the Church
of San Nicola di Bari in the town of Casal di Principe while
preparing to offer a Mass for the feast of Saint Joseph.
He was 35.
In his bestselling 2006 Camorra exposeé Gomorrah, writer
Saviano, who personally knew Father Diana, dedicated a chapter
to the priest. The title of the book comes from a letter by
Diana, "time has come to stop being a Gomorrah." "He decided to
take an interest in the dynamics of power and not merely its
corollary suffering," Saviano wrote. "He didn't want merely to
clean the wound but to understand the mechanisms of the
metastasis, to prevent the cancer from spreading, to block the
source of whatever was turning his home into a gold mine of
capital with an abundance of cadavers."
On March 20, 2014, Pope Francis gave a speech urging the mafia
to change their ways and repent, and threatened them with
excommunication. After the speech, he donned a priestly
ceremonial garment once worn by Diana.
Saviano, 41, has been living in round-the-clock police
protection since he denounced the Casalesi in Gomorrah, which
was turned into a Cannes-winning film and later a hit TV series.
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