Pope Leo XIV traveled Saturday to the “Land of Fires” near Naples, Italy, where the Camorra mafia has illegally dumped and burned toxic waste for decades, visiting a region where cancer rates exceed the national average among its roughly three million residents.
The U.S.-born pope arrived by popemobile at a piazza in Acerra, a city of about 60,000, and addressed clergy and families of environmental pollution victims at the city’s cathedral, according to AFP.
“This land has paid a heavy price. It has seen many of its children buried. It has borne witness to the suffering of children and innocents,” Leo said.
He blamed what he called “a deadly mix of obscure interests and indifference toward the common good” for poisoning both the land and the communities that depend on it. He also praised local activists, calling them “pioneers” whose “courageous commitment” had kept the crisis visible.
The area around Acerra, in the southern Campania region, has been contaminated by heavy metals, dioxins and asbestos since the late 1980s. Companies paid the Camorra a fraction of legal disposal costs to dump industrial waste — including asbestos sheets, car tires and chemical containers — in the soil or set it alight, AFP reported.
A series of parliamentary inquiries since 2013 found authorities negligent and in some cases complicit. Italy’s Senate declared in 2018 that mob criminality and political inaction had caused an ecological disaster. In 2025, Europe’s top rights court ruled that Italy had failed to protect residents and gave the government two years to address the situation.
Saturday’s visit fell on the 11th anniversary of “Laudato Si,” the environmental encyclical in which Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, denounced the unchecked exploitation of the natural world.
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