Pope: Mafioso Risk Going To Hell With "Blood-Stained Power"
Toto Riina never sleeps in his prison bed without pictures of the saints pasted on the wall around his head... Bernardo Provenzano's knowledge of the Bible is legendary. When he was finally arrested police found four bibles on his bedside table complete with annotations and underlining... Value systems that propose to offer the absolute -- such as communism, democracy and religious faith -- have to give devotees an entire system to explain the world, as well as rules and codes for what constitutes "good behavior." Most importantly, there must be an ideological foundation from which everything else springs. The Catholic Church, of which I am a member, offers believers salvation, eternal life, the rite of reconciliation. But as the Mafia can give its members no metaphysical or ideological foundation, it has turned to religion, using components of the Catholic Church to reconstruct a false version of the Catholic God to justify itself. (This belief is ...