Pope Benedict has used a mass in Sicily's capital Palermo to denounce organised crime in Italy, but stopped short of condemning the island's Mafia.

The Pope used the mass in the Mafia heartland to call on Sicilians to be "ashamed of evil, which offends God and man," and call for the effects of organised crime to be brought into the open.

But anti-Mafia campaigners are disappointed that the Pope stopped short of using the word "Mafia".

Campaigners had been hoping for a clearer statement that the Mafia and Christianity are incompatible.

Instead the Pope urged the tens of thousands of pilgrims at the Palermo mass to have faith in the face of job shortages, uncertainty about the future, moral and physical suffering, and organised crime.

The Pope's message was not as strong as that taken to Sicily by his predecessor Pope John Paul II, who used his last visit to Sicily to declare that: "No Mafia can change nor trample underfoot the right to life."