ROME, Italy -- A group of men stood in a circle outside a church in a secluded patch of Italy, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the background. In the middle, an 80-year-old mafia boss spoke, having been elected leader of "The Crime," the local mob syndicate.

"The Crime doesn't belong to anyone. It belongs to everyone," he said, finally.

The unscripted scene came from footage secretly filmed by Italian police during a months-long investigation that led to the arrests July 13 of around 300 members of the 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate. Among those arrested was Domenico Oppedisano, newly elected "capocrimine," or "head of crime," leader of the group that oversees the syndicate's burgeoning operations in the Calabria region.

Enriched by trans-Atlantic cocaine trafficking over the past few decades, the 'Ndrangheta has overtaken the Sicilian Mafia as the most powerful crime organization in Italy, police say.

The Italian government and prosecutors hailed the raid as a milestone. But it has proved embarrassing for Monsignor Giuseppe Morosini, bishop of the Locri diocese in Calabria. The setting the mobsters had chosen for their meeting was the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi, a Marian shrine high in the impassable Aspromonte Mountains.

In fact, it showed that, notwithstanding the church's vocal condemnations in recent years, Italy's organized crime still has ties to Catholic rites and traditions. This, said sociologist Alessandra Dino, who has written a book on links between the church and Mafia, is no surprise.

"Mobsters don't just 'use' religion in order to increase consensus and complicity for their actions," said Ms. Dino, who bases her work on interviews with former mafiosi and on their trial depositions. By "adopting pseudo-religious rituals or sitting in the first rows of pews at masses and processions," mobsters "set themselves as models" for other people, she said.

Ms. Dino said they "create a mechanism to grant themselves impunity from guilt." Mobsters believe themselves "moved by higher motives," she said. "They say: '... we were acting in the name of God's justice, which is higher than the state's.' "

The perception is false, said Monsignor Morosini, who reacted swiftly after release of the film footage, penning an open letter to the 'Ndrangheta mobsters.

"We had always thought that these meetings at holy shrines were folklore, but now we have had to rethink," he wrote, adding that the church "feels deeply sorry" for the mobsters' having transformed the Polsi shrine "from a place of faith into a place of lawlessness."

In an interview, the monsignor said mobsters "did not live by Christian values," even if they showed off their devotion with an "obsequious behavior towards the church, such as kissing sacred images." He added: "Faith has nothing to do with their activities, and, as bishop, I invited them to convert and repent."

Though Monsignor Morosini's letter has been widely praised, social activists and anti-Mafia campaigners have questioned why it came only after release of the meeting video. The church has been "silent" on the mobsters' exhibited religiosity too long, says social activist Vincenzo Linarello, who has funded co-op businesses that have been mafia targets because they refused to pay protection money.

Ms. Dino said the church should have acted earlier. "It knows where many of the generous donations for the shrine came from. It should have rejected them." Moreover, the bishop's letter "downplays the link" between the Polsi shrine and the 'Ndrangheta, she said, "and blames it only on the mobsters -- forgetting that it was the church that let it fester."

Monsignor Morosini, bishop of Locri since 2008, said the church was working to change " centuries-old traditions."

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