Pope John Paul II kept up his attack on the Mafia Saturday and the mob apparently answered back, leaving a slaughtered lamb on the doorstep of a prison chaplain.

The mob sent its latest macabre challenge to the church's moral authority on a day when John Paul paid tribute to a priest slain last year. The churchman was killed after heeding the pontiff's earlier call to speak out against the Mafia.The Rev. Gino Sacchetti, 55, found the dead lamb with its throat slit on Saturday, Italian news reports said. Attached was the message, "You will meet the same end."

Sacchetti is chaplain at the prison in Termini Imerese, 25 miles outside Palermo, and reportedly had worked with Mafiosi cooperating with prosecutors. Sacchetti's car had been torched in September.

The pope's three-day trip to eastern Sicily, with stops in Catania and Siracusa, was his first tour since he canceled last month's U.S. trip because his right leg, injured in a fall April 29, was healing slowly.

He appeared frail and used a cane, but John Paul was resolute as he continued his attacks on the Mafia, begun during another trip to Sicily, in May 1993.

Meeting with young inmates in Catania, he underlined the need in Sicily for "redemption and liberation, especially from the powers of the Mafia and other dark forces."

"Whoever is responsible for violence and bloodshed will have to answer to the judgment of God," he said, echoing his call last year.

At an open-air Mass earlier Saturday in Catania, shadowed by the Mount Etna volcano, John Paul paid tribute to the Rev. Giuseppe Puglisi, who was killed by the mob in September, 1993.

John Paul called him a "courageous witness to the truth of the Scriptures," drawing long applause from a crowd of several hundred thousand people.

Sitting in the front row were the mother and sister of Judge Paolo Borsellino, a leading anti-Mafia prosecutor killed in 1992.

The pope's visit came as the church suffers new intimidations.

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One Palermo priest reportedly left the island after receiving death threats last month and another watched as many in his congregation walk out when he urged them not to yield to Mafia influence.

Upon arriving in Catania, the pope told Sicilians that the time had passed to be cowardly in the face of the mob.

"Catania, rise up and cloak yourself in light and justice," he said.

"For too long the children of this community have suffered the humiliation of being written off as residents of a decaying and violent city, dominated by organized crime, resigned to an unbearable surrender."

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