Italian judge killed by Sicilian mafia to be beatified as martyr

An Italian judge who was killed by gunmen in the Sicilian mafia in 1990
will be beatified as a martyr, the Vatican has announced.
In a decree of martyrdom published on Tuesday, Pope Francis wrote that
Rosario Livatino had been murdered for his faith, and likened his killing to
a hate crime against the Catholic faith.
Known as the “boy judge” because he looked younger than his 37 years,
Livatino had led many investigations into the mob at a time when Sicilian
clans were involved in a full-blown war. The bosses of la Stidda (the star),
a mafia criminal group operating in the central-southern part of Sicily,
ordered Livatino’s death. On 21 September 1990, as Livatino drove his
Ford Fiesta along the Agrigento highway, he was rammed by another car
and forced to stop. Livatino tried to escape on foot across the fields but
the four killers caught up with him and shot him dead. During the
investigation, the prosecutors noted that, in all his diaries, Livatino wrote
a mysterious abbreviation: “s.t.d.”, which they later understood to be the
Latin acronym. After his death, John Paul II described Livatino as “a martyr
of justice and faith”