Religion In Italy

(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 8 - Pope Benedict XVI strongly condemned violence against children in all forms on Monday but expressed particular distress over abuse within the Catholic Church.

Addressing the annual assembly of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, the pontiff suggested Church figures linked to child abuse had violated some of Christianity's most fundamental principles.

''Over the centuries the Church, following in Christ's footsteps, has promoted the protection of the dignity and rights of minors,'' said Benedict.

(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 5 - Wartime pope Pius XII was asked by the German Resistance not to speak out directly against Nazism and Hitler, the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano said on Friday.

"The German anti-Nazi Resistance asked Pius XII not to directly intervene against Hitler," said the daily, citing documents published by Italian historian Ennio Di Nolfo on relations between the United States and the Vatican from 1939 to 152.

(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 5 - Euthanasia "strikes at the very heart" of Christianity, Pope Benedict XVI told visiting Scottish bishops, voicing concern over a bill presented to Scotland's parliament to allow assisted suicide.

"Euthanasia strikes at the very heart of the Christian understanding of the dignity of human life," said the 82-year-old German pontiff, who is scheduled to visit England, Wales and Scotland in September.

(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 3 - A group of jugglers and acrobats accompanied by the pounding sound of disco music entertained Pope Benedict XVI and hundreds of faithful gathered for his weekly general audience on Wednesday.

Benedict smiled and clapped several times as the colourfully dressed troupe from Italy's American Circus performed a lively, hat-juggling act next to his papal throne.

The 82-year-old pontiff got up to greet and thank them at the end of their five-minute show.

(ANSA) - Ankara, February 2 - The Turkish gunman who shot John Paul II has told the brother of a girl who vanished 27 years ago she is alive and well, it emerged on Tuesday.

Mehmet Ali Agca told Pietro Orlandi that his sister, Emanuela, will return home soon, according to a report by Rome-based Turkish journalist Yasemin Taskin.

Shortly after her disappearance aged 15 in 1983, a terrorist group promised to free Emanuela in exchange for the release of Ali Agca, who was serving a sentence for his 1981 attempt on the pope's life.

(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 1 - Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano has defended wartime pope Pius XII against fresh allegations that he didn't do enough to support Jews during the Holocaust.

The opinion piece in the daily refers to two documents discovered by Italian researchers in the UK, which appear to lend support to critics of Pius.

But L'Osservatore Romano dismisses the contents of the diplomatic notes, which it says reveal nothing new about the pontiff and his beliefs.

(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 1 - Pope Benedict XVI on Monday urged English and Welsh bishops to give a warm welcome to Anglican clergy wanting to 'return' to Rome.

Meeting the bishops in the wake of a report that Queen Elizabeth II had been concerned by the Vatican's November move to make it easier for disaffected Anglicans to join the Catholic Church, the pope asked the bishops "to be generous" in applying the 'Anglicanorum Coetibus' ('Groups of Anglicans') constitution set up by the Vatican on November 4.

(corrects spelling of judge's name from 'Maggi' to 'Magi').

(ANSA) - Milan, February 1 - An Italian judge on Monday criticised the way state secrecy norms were applied in a landmark trial in which he convicted 22 CIA agents but acquitted Italy's top two former spies for the abduction of a Milan-based Egyptian cleric in 2003.

(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 1 - Pope Benedict XVI on Monday urged English and Welsh bishops to give a warm welcome to Anglican clergy wanting to 'return' to Rome.

Meeting the bishops in the wake of a report that Queen Elizabeth II had been concerned by the Vatican's November move to make it easier for disaffected Anglicans to join the Catholic Church, the pope asked the bishops "to be generous" in applying the 'Anglicanorum Coetibus' ('Groups of Anglicans') constitution set up by the Vatican on November 4.

(corrects date).

(ANSA) - Milan, February 1 - An Italian judge on Monday criticised the way state secrecy norms were applied in a landmark trial in which he convicted 22 CIA agents but acquitted Italy's top two former spies for the abduction of a Milan-based Egyptian cleric in 2003.

(ANSA) - Milan, November 4 - An Italian judge on Monday criticised the way state secrecy norms were applied in a landmark trial in which he convicted 22 CIA agents but acquitted Italy's top two former spies for the abduction of a Milan-based Egyptian cleric in 2003.

Publishing the arguments for his November 4 verdict, Judge Oscar Maggi said a Constitutional Court ruling that state secrecy applied to relations between US and Italian spies but not to the crime itself "constitutes a logical and juridical paradox of absolute and worrying scope".

(ANSA) - Vatican City, January 29 - Pope Benedict XVI urged the Vatican's Roman Rota tribunal on Friday to get tougher with couples seeking annulments from Church marriages, saying more effort must be made to ensure reconciliation.

Even though the tribunal still rejects more requests than it grants, the pope said the indissolubility of Christian marriage must be respected and judges should not be lax to "subjective requests" leading to "annulments at all costs".

(ANSA) - Rome, January 29 - Foreign residents are no more likely to commit crimes than Italians, a top church official said Friday in a rebuff against a recent claim by Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

"Our statistics show that the crime rates among foreigners and Italians are analogous if not identical," said Secretary-General of the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) Msgr. Mariano Crociata.

(ANSA) - Rome, January 29 - More than half of Italians support the display of crucifixes in classrooms and public buildings and oppose a recent European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling ordering their removal, a new study reported Friday.

The poll by Eurispes socioeconomic think-tank showed that Italians had not changed their minds on the Christian symbol since last surveyed in 2006, with 60% still in favor of leaving them in place.

(ANSA) - Rome, January 27 - The Italian parliament is considering a ban on veils that mask Muslim women's faces similar to the one proposed this week in France, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said Wednesday.

He said members of his own devolutionist Northern League party had actually beaten France to the bunch when they put their own bill banning burqas in public last fall.