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  <img src="http://vaticanstamps.org/VPS/images/letterlogo.jpg" alt="Logo" height="90">    
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      <b><h1 class='Shead1'>Vatican Stamp Notes</h1></b>
   </div>      
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<center>
<img height='275' src='http://vaticanstamps.org/VPS/images/296/1673.jpg'><br>
<b>Father Giuseppe Puglisi<br>
25th Anniversary of Death<br>
Scott 1673 (2018)</center></b>
<br>
October 21 marks the memorial for Blessed Giuseppe Puglisi, a Roman Catholic priest who was assassinated by Mafia gunmen on the island of Sicily in 1993.  He was the first person killed by the Mafia to be beatified by the Catholic Church.  The stamp above, issued in a mini-sheet format of six stamps (shown at the bottom of the article), was released to remember the 25th anniversary of his death.
<br><br>
Giuseppe "Pino" Puglisi was born in Palermo, Sicily, on September 15, 1937.  He was raised in the Palermo neighborhood of Brancaccio, a rough, working class section of the city. He was ordained a priest in 1960 by Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini of Palermo, who viewed communism as the bigger threat in his archdiocese than the Mafia: he in fact denied the existence of the Mafia.  This denial spurred Puglisi to challenge church authorities with regard to the need to address this threat. He is quoted as saying:
<blockquote>
<i>"we can, we must criticize the church when we feel it doesn't respond to our expectations, because it's absolutely right to seek to improve it".</i>
</blockquote>
In 1990, Father Puglisi was transferred to his old neighborhood and became the pastor of San Gaetano's Parish in Brancaccio. He repeatedly spoke out against the Mafia, and opened a center for underprivileged children to shelter them from the influences of the Mafia.  With little support from the archdiocese of Palermo, Puglisi attempted to break the "code of silence" (or "omertà") to expose the negative influences affecting his parishioners.  His "reward" for these efforts was his execution by the Mafia on September 15, 1993, his 56th birthday.  Shot at point-blank range, Father Puglisi's last words were reported to have been "I've been expecting you".
<br><br>
<center>
<img height='375' src='https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Tomb_of_Giuseppe_Puglisi_-_Cathedral_of_Palermo_-_Italy_2015.JPG'><br>
<b>Tomb of Father Giuseppe Puglisi, Cathedral of Palermo<br>
Photo by Jose Luiz<br>
From Wikimedia Commons, used under the terms of the Creative<br>
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license</b></center>
<br><br>
In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI allowed the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints to designate Father Puglisi as a martyr, with the Pope saying Father Puglisi had been killed "in hatred of the faith".  As a martyr, Father Puglisi could be beatified (the last step before sainthood) without a miracle being attributed to his intercession with God.  His beatification took place on May 25, 2013.
<br><br>
<center>
<img height='375' src='http://vaticanstamps.org/VPS/images/296/1673M.jpg'><br>
<b>Father Giuseppe Puglisi<br>Minisheet, Scott 1673M (2018)</center></b>
<br><br>
The feast days for many saints and blessed figures are commemorated on their "dies natalis" (translated to mean "birth day" or "anniversary"), where the day of their death or martyrdom, their physical death on earth, is viewed as a birth into eternal life in heaven.  For Blessed Giuseppe Puglisi, his memorial falls on October 21, which marks the anniversary of his baptism.
<br><br>
<b>REFERENCES:</b><br>
<li>Wikipedia.com, <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pino_Puglisi'>Pino Puglisi</a><br>
<li>UFN, February 6, 2018, <a href='https://vaticanstamps.org/UFN/images/2018-2-02-1.jpg'>25th Anniversary of the Death of Blessed Fr. Giuseppe Puglisi</a><br>
<li>Vatican Philatelic Society website, www.vaticanstamps.org, Stamp Database Search
<br><br>

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