Pope Francis is set to visit the southern Italian town where a three-year-old boy was murdered by the mafia earlier this year.
The Pope will make a pastoral visit to Cassano al Jonio on 21 June, five months after little Nicola Campolongo was shot and his body burned.
The visit follows warnings by a senior anti-mafia prosecutor that Francis has become a mob target because of his zealous clean-up of the Vatican’s finances.
The body of tiny Nicola was found at an abandoned farmhouse near the town after his grandfather failed to pay a debt for drugs.
The boy’s grandfather was caring for Nicola, nicknamed Coco, because his father and mother were both in jail for mafia offences. He was also shot dead.
Just weeks later, a second little boy, Domenico Petruzzelli, was killed in a mafia shooting near Bari.
The news prompted Francis to launch a vocal attack on the mob as he held a historic meeting with victims’ families in Rome.
He told organised crime bosses they will end up in hell if they do not "repent" and give up their lives of "bloodstained money [and] blood-stained power".
Previous popes have been reluctant to criticise mafia bosses. Victims had to wait until 1993 to hear an explicit papal condemnation, when John Paul II urged the guilty to renounce their "culture of death".
Earlier this year Pope Francis asked an Italian bishop who has consistently criticised the mafia, Mgr Giancarlo Bregantini, Archbishop of Campobasso-Boiano, to write the meditations for this year’s Via Crucis service at the Colosseum on Good Friday.
In March Francis joined in a prayer vigil in Rome with some 700 people whose innocent relatives were killed by organised crime networks in recent years.
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