Vatican Criticizes Italian Leader Over Quip

REUTERS, Sept. 28 — While his policies have been much more favorable to the Church than those of previous governments, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has come under fire by the Vatican for making insensitive remarks about 35 Liberian immigrants who drowned last month while trying to enter Italy illegally.

In an interview last week, he was questioned about why police used small, pedal-operated boats (or pedali) to collect the bodies. Berlusconi said, “It's not every day that they have to pick up corpses, and sometimes pedali work well. None of the [corpses] complained.”

The next day, Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano condemned his remarks as flippant.

“Sometimes spirited quips are not only out-of-place but also macabre, in bad taste and downright offensive,” the paper wrote in an editorial. “It is inconceivable to be ironic about the dead.”

Berlusconi replied to questioners, “Perhaps you would have preferred it if the bodies had been picked up in a big boat.”

Hundreds of illegal migrants try to enter Italy every day through her large, vulnerable coastline as an entry point to the European Union, which has abolished internal border controls. The Berlusconi government has taken numerous measures to try to stem the flow of immigrants, citing the burdens to its public welfare system and the increasing threat of Islamic fundamentalism in Italy.

Pope to Become Honorary Citizen of Rome

LA REPUBBLICA (Rome), Sept. 23 — It is a city in which his first predecessor, St. Peter, and many other popes died as martyrs and which later popes ruled as monarchs right up until 1870, when Italian nationalists conquered the last of the papal states. Successive popes until Pius XI held themselves “prisoners of the Vatican.” Now, the City of Rome will offer Pope John Paul II honorary citizenship.

Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni will confer citizenship on the Holy Father on Oct. 31, according to Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Details have yet to be finalized, but Holy See officials said the mayor would likely hand the Pope the keys to the Eternal City at a Vatican ceremony.

Holy Father to Address Parliament of Italy

ASSOCIATED PRESS, Oct. 2 — In a historic gesture, Pope John Paul II in November plans to address a joint session of the Italian parliament, a body that once helped displace papal government in Italy and for which Catholics were once forbidden to run or vote on pain of excommunication.

The Holy Father will speak to the legislators on Nov. 14.

Marco Politi, a biographer of the Pope, wrote in La Repubblica, “It will be a Polish Pope to enter the palace that symbolizes the sovereignty of the Italian people. It's as if only a Pope who came from afar could definitely close the gap” separating Church and state in Italy, where anticlericalism is still alive and well.