Books: Some Sort of Sicilian Saint

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"Pack of Jews." Today the Mafia seems to have agreed to live and let Dolci live, although he has given wide publicity to telling statistics—such as that in one village Mafia murders since 1945 outnumber the village's dead of both world wars. As for the Roman Catholic Church, Dolci is now a "lapsed Catholic," and he blames the breach on the "lack of a tradition of charity, even on the level of almsgiving" of the church in Sicily. His fall from the faith he also attributes to the sermons of two Sicilian priests: one denounced a destitute congregation of peasants as "a pack of Jews" for failing to supply the church lire they did not have; the other instructed his peasant parishioners to ostracize sinners.