Beatified on 9 May 2021 in Agrigento
by Salvatore Alletto
It was the morning of September 21, 1990. Rosario Livatino, a young magistrate of just 37 years of age, was on his way as every day to the Court of Agrigento where he served. Having left his hometown of Canicattì, with his old amaranth colored Ford Fiesta, without an escort, a few kilometers from Agrigento he was reached, rammed and shot at. Neither the first nor the last in a long list of state representatives killed because of their commitment to justice and legality.
Yet the assassination of Rosario Livatino arouses such amazement and dismay. Certainly due to his young age, but also because his death will reveal the moral caliber of that young man who grew up in a humble family and matured in the ranks of Catholic Action. Far from the spotlight, entirely dedicated to the cause of justice, his commitment is rooted in a living and lived faith. Many still remember him when he went in the morning to pray in the Church dedicated to Saint Joseph adjacent to the Court. In Livatino's 1978 agenda there is almost a promise regarding his profession as a magistrate, dated 18 July; sounds like an offering of life: «Today I took the oath: from today I am in the judiciary. May God accompany me and help me to respect the oath and to behave in the way that the education that my parents gave me requires." A clear faith nourished in prayer which was transformed into testimony in the workplace. A phrase stands out among his notes: «When we die, no one will come to ask us how much we were believers, but how credible».
His work diary was found on the slope where Rosario Livatino had tried to escape the mafia killers. On the first page of her the three letters "STD", an acronym which meant that everything she did was Sub Tutela Dei. «A face like a baby Jesus» someone recalls, but with a courage that was certainly a gift from God. «Come on, what have I done to you?» he seems to have told his assassins that morning that they killed him out of hatred for the faith. John Paul II defined him as a "martyr of justice and indirectly of faith". He affirmed this, deeply touched after the visit to Rosario's elderly parents. And it was precisely that meeting that aroused in him the anathema against the mafiosi in the Valley of the Temples of Agrigento on that historic May 9, 1993. And it will be another May 9, that of 2021 or 28 years later, that will bring Rosario Livatino to the honors of the altars like Beato.
For everyone, the wish of Pope Francis, who, speaking of the next blessed, stated: «The good smell of Christ that spreads from the martyred body of the young judge will then become a seed of rebirth - as has already happened for some of his assassins and instigators, today on the path of penance and conversion - for all of us, in particular for those who still experience situations of violence, wars, attacks, persecution for ethnic or religious reasons, and various abuses against human dignity".