In Altavilla Milicia, Sicily, a man allegedly assisted by two friends and by his daughter killed his wife and two sons whom he believe were possessed by the devil. He was not part of any “cult.”
by Massimo Introvigne
On February 11, 2024, I was in the Lithuanian spa resort of Druskininkai for a rare holiday. All of a sudden the phone started ringing. It did not stop for a week. Many if not most of the main Italian TV channels and newspapers wanted to know my opinion about a horrible crime. In the Sicilian village of Altavilla Milicia, a man called Giovanni Barreca had tortured and killed his wife Antonella and two sons, Kevin and Emanuel, who were 16 and 5 respectively, then had called the police inviting the agents to come and arrest him. Barreca claimed he had to kill his wife and sons because they were possessed by the devil.
As it often happens in these cases, information was initially contradictory. It was reported that Barreca’s third child, a 17-year-old daughter, had miraculously escaped the carnage. Later, however, she confessed she had been her father’s accomplice and was arrested.
One of the few sources of information for the media was Barreca’s Facebook page. He had posted there religious material about prophecies, devils, and exorcisms from several different sources, including videos featuring Roberto Amatulli, a former hairdresser from Bari turned self-appointed Evangelical preacher and itinerant exorcist. Since Amatulli had already been denounced by investigative journalists and by fellow Evangelicals as a fraud, there was enough material online to write articles about him, while there was almost nothing about Barreca.
Some journalists depicted Amatulli both as a charlatan whose aim was to collect money from his naive followers and the inspirer of the Altavilla Milicia crime. Many Italian Evangelicals would concur with the first assessment, but Amatulli vigorously denied the second, i.e., that he had ever met Barreca. Anybody can post his videos on social media, he said, but those who tried to involve him in the crime will hear from his lawyer. Few journalists paused to reflect that a charlatan out for his followers’ money normally would not incite them to kill their relatives. They will end out in jail and will stop sending money to him.
While Amatulli slowly exited the media reports (but not entirely), a couple from Palermo, Massimo Carandente and Sabrina Fina, were arrested and accused of having participated in the homicides. Although they claim they are innocent, and the presumption of innocence should obviously be respected, the authorities believe there is evidence they were part of a prayer group that met in Barreca’s home and talked a lot about the dangerous action in the world of Satan and his minions. According to the prosecutor, they also participated in the deadly “exorcisms.” If there were other persons in addition to Barreca and the Palermo couple who participated in these prayer meetings, they have not yet been clearly identified and it seems they did not suspect that a crime was in the making.
After the breaking news came the op-eds and the comments. I was interviewed during Italy’s most watched talk show, “Porta a Porta” (Door to Door), and by more than a dozen of TVs, radios, and newspapers. Anti-cultists of the FECRIS persuasions were also interviewed by some important media. Others contacted Raffaella Di Marzio, who has also worked with CESNUR but has her own organization.
As days passed, the word “setta” (“cult”) started to be liberally used. Since Italy has witnessed some real crimes perpetrated by Satanists (including the homicides by the “Beasts of Satan” between 1998 and 2004), several media insisted that Barreca and his friends were members of a “Satanic cult.” I kept explaining that it was the other way around. Judging from their social media accounts, the deadly Sicilian trio believed to be on a mission for Jesus to combat Satan and destroy the devil’s minions, i.e., the Satanists, whom they saw literally everywhere. To their credit, even the FECRIS fellows agreed that Satanists had nothing to do with what happened.
Pentecostals, however, were a different matter. It was not difficult to ascertain that Barreca had attended the services of the Pentecostal church of his village, although for a short period of time. Having written several books on religious minorities in Sicily, I happen to know that Pentecostal church as both respectable and respected, as is Italian Pentecostalism in general. Certainly the Pentecostal Church of Altavilla Milicia could not be held responsible for Barreca’s crimes.
Some anti-cultists, however, do not particularly like the Pentecostals. The representative of one of Italy’s FECRIS affiliates told the daily “Repubblica,” speaking of the alleged “cult” of Barreca, that “Often these cults arise in the environment of Evangelicalism or Pentecostalism. They are churches that espouse the idea that each pastor has his own discernment. It is easier then for cells to break away from the official church. Jim Jones, who led the 1978 mass suicide with over 900 deaths, was a pastor belonging to the evangelical Pentecostal church.” One problem here is that, as all serious scholars of the Guyana mass suicide know, Jim Jones was a pastor of the Disciples of Christ, a denomination that is not Pentecostal.
The main point, however, is that micro-communities of two, three, or ten persons may arise in both a Catholic and Protestant milieu. I told to the “Porta a Porta” anchorman the story of a similar group I studied in 1994. It was a group of nine persons, all part of related families, who killed a 50-day-old infant, a small girl called Maria Ilenia Politanò, in Polistena, Calabria, believing she was possessed by the Devil. While Barreca and his friends used an Evangelical language, the assassins of Polistena tortured and killed Maria Ilenia while praying Father Pio, Italy’s most popular Catholic saint (although not yet canonized at that time), and the Virgin of Lourdes. In Japan, seven persons were killed in 1995 during exorcisms performed by a small group that used a Shinto- and Buddhist-derivative language. Two were executed in 2012.
Ultimately, the Italian anti-cultists did not resist the temptation of using the Altavilla Milicia murders to vituperate against “cults” in general. In the same “Repubblica” interview, readers were told that the problem is that “sects hide behind drug prevention initiatives proposed to schools.” Indeed, the Church of Scientology does propose drug prevention initiatives in schools, but what this has to do with Barreca’s crimes is unclear. Another FECRIS representative appeared in television to criticize the “New Age” and the “psycho-cults.” The spokesperson of the populist opposition party Five Star Movement used Barreca’s crimes to call for a commission investigating “cults.”
The answer I offered, that many found persuasive—in the “Porta a Porta” show where criminologists, journalists and others discussed the case nobody disagreed—is that there was no “cult.” Creating French-style agencies to harass “cults” would not contribute in any way to prevent cases such as the Altavilla Milicia tragedy. I believe that “cult” is not a valid category in general—while there are “criminal religious movements” within both the old and the new religious tradition. However, in the case of Altavilla Milicia, there was no movement. There might have been four persons (including Barreca’s daughter) who met to share their fear of the devil and their paranoias about conspiracies, and to express them in the religious language they knew, in their case Evangelical. But in the equally tragic case of the infant killed in Polistena the language was Catholic.
The language is not important. It comes from memories, or from the Internet. What is important is that in a country where slightly more than 20% of the population (before COVID: probably they are less now) is regularly in touch with organized religion, yet only 7% identify themselves at atheists, there is an enormous religious Far West inhabited by those who are interested in some form of religion or spirituality but seek it outside of the institutional religious organizations, large or small. Luigi Berzano and other sociologists have studied the proliferation of “do-it-yourself” religions, where Italians pursue religious interests individually or in small groups. Obviously, the vast majority of these micro-groups do not commit crimes. If it was not so, carnages such as the one that terrorized the quiet village of Altavilla Milicia would occur daily. But the incident shows that tragedies, although happily rare, may occur. Although we may suspect that there are thousands of such groups—normally, let me repeat it, inoffensive—they remain largely invisible. Four friends praying at home and even sharing apocalyptic or conspiracy theories do not leave a trace, unless they try to proselytize, and most don’t.
We may have different opinions about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Unification Church or the Church of Scientology, but harassing them as France or Japan do would not in any way prevent the pulverization of the sacred and the functioning of groups of two, three, or ten people that no parliamentary commission on “cults” nor anti-cult governmental agency would identify. They are simply part of a different phenomenon.
A final comment for our non-Italian readers. When the tragedy happened, most national and local (Sicilian) media contacted CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, of which I am managing director, for information and comments—although some contacted the anti-cultists, whose freedom of expression I am certainly not proposing to limit. In general, however, it was not the anti-cult narrative that prevailed in the media. The “cult” of Altavilla Milicia was quickly constructed, but almost as quickly deconstructed. In the UK, something similar would have happened due to the presence of INFORM as an independent information center on religious and spiritual pluralism. The absence of institutions such as CESNUR or INFORM explains why in Japan, for example, when an incident such as the assassination of Shinzo Abe happened, only the anti-cult lawyers and their publicists were heard by the media. It is a serious problem. But one that it is perhaps not too late to solve.
