After the diocese of Rome refused a public funeral for Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke, the breakaway Society of St Pius X arranged a funeral that was suspended after a clash between ultra-right-wing sympathisers and enraged citizens.
The controversy over the proposed funeral overshadowed ceremonies commemorating the 70th anniversary of the deportation of more than 1000 of the Rome’s Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Priebke died aged 100 while serving a life sentence of house arrest for carrying out a 1944 massacre of 335 Italian civilians.
The diocese of Rome refused his lawyer’s request to allow a funeral to take place in a church or chapel.
“Considering all the circumstances of the case, the ecclesial authorities believed that prayer for the deceased and entrusting him to the mercy of God — the aims of a religious funeral — should take place in the strictest privacy,” the diocese said.
Bishop Marcello Semeraro of Albano, secretary of Pope Francis’s Council of Cardinals, told a Rome newspaper that the Church would never prohibit prayers for someone, but canon law allowed a bishop to deny a public funeral to a “manifest sinner” when it would scandalise the faithful.
Then the traditionalist Society of St Pius X stepped in, offering a funeral Mass in its church in the small town of Albano Laziale, south of Rome.
But the SSPX did not take into account the anger of the townspeople, whose memory of the horrors of the Nazi occupation is still vivid.
Hundreds of people, young and old, came out to protest, kicking the hearse as it arrived. Clashes also broke out with Nazi sympathisers who had arrived in the town.
The funeral was suspended and the coffin put in an unmarked police van and taken to a military airport until it could be determined where Priebke’s remains will be buried or cremated.
The city of Rome, Priebke’s adopted home in Argentina (where he lived for nearly 50 years) and the town of his birth in Germany all refused his burial.
Sources:
Image: The Australian
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