Mafia and Church

Title: Mafia and Church
Original Publication Date: 10/25/2023
Transcript URL: share.descript.com/view/BZyv8VrPajJ
Description: Today we have a special crossover episode between the History of the Papacy Podcast and Organized Crime and Punishment. Chris and Steve talk about how much religion, particularly the Catholic Church, has impacted the Mafia and how the Mafia has impacted the Catholic Church. This relationship goes far into the past and exists to this very day!
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Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime, with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris.
Thank you for joining me again today. I have a special program today featuring the brand new podcast I've launched with my co host, Mustache Chris. called Organized Crime and Punishment, a history and crime podcast. Organized Crime and Punishment takes the true crime genre and injects it with the heavy dose of the, uh, the much needed history podcast genre.
Mustache Chris and I will... Take you through [00:01:00] some of the most fascinating topics in organized crime throughout the history of the United States, and even beyond the United States. And a lot of it is actually gonna cross over with history of the Papa c and in coming episodes and seasons. Mustache. Why don't you introduce yourself to the history of the Papacy audience nicknames, uh, mustache.
Chris was the story behind that, but you'll have to listen to the new podcast too. Uh, Get why I have that nickname. I have a mustache, but there's a, there's a little more for it too. Yeah. I don't know if you ever listened to Steve's like beyond the big screen podcast. It became like quite frequent guest on there.
Um, you know, we're discussing movies and. You know, this, this new show that we're going to be doing, uh, came about because we were discussing mafia movies and we were both, uh, kind of history dorks and, um, you know, one thing led to another and the series just kept on getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And we decided this, why don't we just do [00:02:00] a history of organized crime in general? You know, just we're going to do the mafia, but, you know, we're talking about doing, you know, all around the world. So we really, it was, we needed to get set free from being held back by. We had to tie something into a movie and we could really go where we wanted to go and follow the history.
Wherever it took us, and it's taking us in all sorts of interesting places, which really ties into today's episode. We're going to let you wet your beak a little bit on what Mustache Chris and I will offer in this new podcast series with an episode on the history of the Catholic Church and the Mafia.
We'll discuss a few of the people and events where the Mafia and the Church... Collided and crossed over. If you want to learn more and subscribe to organized crime and punishment, you can find it on Spotify, Apple podcasts, your podcatcher of choice, and on YouTube. And if you enjoy [00:03:00] what you hear, make sure you tell a friend about this podcast so that they can be friend of friends of ours.
So let me give you a little background, basically. The Roman Catholic Church has had a very strange relationship with various organized crime organizations in southern Italy since they formed in at least the 1800s and even earlier. The full history of the local organized crime outfits in Italy, such as La Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra, and the Campania region of Italy, and the Um, Ju.
Undrangheta of Calabria is really long and something we will get into more properly in the Organized Crime and Punishment podcast. As we've learned throughout this entire series on the popes of the 19th century, the popes hated secret societies that rose in the 19th century, like [00:04:00] the Carbonari, the Freemasons, and others.
And even though the La Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the Uyghurs, and the Calabrians, the Calabrian Gondreta, where secrets, were secret societies and the popes and the church in general hated secret societies. These mafia societies were really quite different than the secular societies. You've read into those ones a bit, Chris.
What do you, what would you say about that? Oh, like the differences between the, like, three, uh, types of three major mafias the more secular, uh, secret societies. Yeah, like, La Cosa Nostra is pretty predominant. That's Sicily's, uh, mafia, really. Um, it's... You know, has a very, uh, hierarchical kind of structure to it.
Um, you know, non Sicilians, you have to be Italian, but non Sicilians could join in the, uh, La Cosa Nostra, right? Um, and it was [00:05:00] like the, the big area where it was based in, but it's on all of Sicily, but Palermo is like the big hotbed of La Cosa Nostra activity. Um, yeah. After the, I would say kind of after the second mafia war, which is not to go down too much of a rabbit hole, they kind of took a step down.
The Camorra, which is, uh, based in, uh, is, I'm sorry, the Camorra is actually probably the oldest out of the all three of the, uh, mafias. Um, it's, uh, I believe from what I've researched, it predates Locosa Nostra, it predates the, uh, the Adrangata. Um, yeah. Yeah, and it's very, it's different than the Locos Nostra in the sense that it's, uh, kind of loosely affiliated.
Like, there is an organizational structure, but it's more kind of like individual cells, like working somewhat together, but also like competing against one another. And the Andrangita, which is based in Calabria, um, is, uh, it's kind of like, it's You know, all [00:06:00] these are all, they're all mafia, so there's a lot of similarities between them, but the Adrangata is, uh, really, really, really, really secretive, and one of the things that kind of makes it unique that, at least from the information that we have available to us, where like, guys in like, they have like family, Say, in La Cosa Nostra, a lot of fathers who try to push to not have their kids join, where in the, with the, the Andrangita, it's the exact opposite, really, like you, they push for their entire families to join and keep it as, like, close knit family wise as possible.
I mean, in some ways it, it, it was kept it from being able to expand, say, like the, like, uh, Lacosa Nostra did, but in a lot of ways it's proven to be highly effective because, uh, as of right now, they're probably the most powerful out of all three of them. Now one big difference between the secular secret societies like the Carbon [00:07:00] and the Freemasons, they were Virulently Virulently, anti-Christian and anti Roman Catholic Church.
And at least on the surface, and I thinking, uh, you might say hourly, but even deeply, these. Were these organizations of the mafia were devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, its institutions and its practices and like many other cultures, the southern Italians were very invested in the folkways of the religion and see the episodes on the resortimento with Joe Pascone of the Turning Tides History podcast to learn more about that.
All of this leads into What is the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Mafia? You would think, well, maybe the …