Cardinal Pietro Parolin says he personally approved the diplomatic communication, which rather than attacking the LGBT community, was intended to express concerns over the proposed Italian legislation.

The Vatican is against any "attitude or gesture of intolerance or hatred toward people motivated by sexual orientations," he added.

Parolin says the Vatican's main concern about the legislation related to the way it was written.

The "vagaries" in the text of the proposed law could expose anyone expressing an opinion about "any possible distinction between man and woman" to prosecution, he explained.

The letter, which has been published by Italian media, claims the law would violate a landmark treaty establishing diplomatic ties between Italy and the Vatican.

The proposed law would put the right of Roman Catholics to freely express themselves at risk, it said.

As an example, the letter cited a clause that would require Catholic schools, along with their public counterparts, to run activities on a designated day against homophobia and transphobia.

The law would add women, people who are homosexual, transsexual or with disabilities, to those protected by a law banning discrimination and punishing hate crimes.

While Italy's lower house of parliament passed the legislation last November, it has been stalled in the Senate because of right-wing concerns that it would limit freedom of expression.

Right-wing leader Matteo Salvini, says anyone saying a family is formed with a man and a woman would be exposed to possible prosecution.

People supporting the law have dismissed these concerns. They say the threshold for prosecution is inciting hatred or violence against the protected classes.

Premier Mario Draghi has rebuffed the Vatican's attempt at influencing the legislative process. "Italy is a secular state," he told parliament.

Many of those outraged with what they see as Vatican meddling are calling for the so-called Lateran Treaty to be cancelled. This treaty, originally established under fascism and revised in the 1980s, established diplomatic ties between the Vatican and predominantly Roman Catholic Italy.

LGBT rights activists say they will be transforming Gay Pride events in Rome and Milan on Saturday into protests against what they see as the Vatican's interference in the Italian legislative process.

In the past, the Vatican has spoken out about other issues. These included objecting to Italian laws legalizing abortion and divorce and backing unsuccessful referendums after the fact to try to repeal them.

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image:Catholic News Agency

"Migrants are first of all human persons, and they are the symbol of all those rejected by today's globalised society," he tweeted on Monday.

However, Italian Twitter users were unimpressed with his views.

Some responded asking Francis to think instead of earthquake victims or of Vincent Lambert, the quadriplegic Frenchman whose parents recently accepted the ending of his life support.

Others said he should spend more time talking about Jesus and other religious topics. Others were even more blunt.

"When you have a bit of time between a lecture on migrants and a sermon on migrants, tell us something about the children and the destroyed families of Bibbiano," one tweet reads.

Bibbiano is the Italian port where the German captain of a private rescue boat carrying illegal immigrants threatened to ram an Italian police vessel trying to stop it from landing last week.

Francis's tweet followed a homily published on Monday in which he focused on migrants, saying:

"These least ones are abandoned and cheated into dying in the desert; these least ones are tortured, abused and violated in detention camps; these least ones face the waves of an unforgiving sea; these least ones are left in reception camps too long for them to be called temporary."

Also on Monday, the front page of Italy's daily la Repubblica newspaper ran the headline: "Catholics at a crossroads: the Pope or Salvini."

The paper was referring to Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who has been at the centre of recent controversy concerning migrants rescued on the Mediterranean when he refused to let charity rescue vessels dock in Italian ports.

Last month his far-right League party introduced laws which would lead to heavy fines for any migrant NGOs which enter Italian waters.

Salvini has vowed that Italy will no longer host the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa every year.

He has also has accused other EU states, especially France and Germany, of hypocrisy for condemning his stance while refusing to take in more arrivals themselves.

Source

• Daily Mail
• Euro News
• Image: Catholic News Agency

The building has been occupied since 2013 after being taken over by activists, who are using it to provide shelter for the homeless and to host several workspaces.

Its power had been cut by its electricity supplier since 6 May because it had accumulated a 300,000 euro debt.

The sum is believed to have accumulated in the years since the unused building was taken over in 2013.

"I intervened personally last night to turn back on the meters. It was a desperate gesture. There were over 400 people without electricity, families with children," says Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, almoner of the office of papal charities.

"I didn't do it because I'm drunk," he added.

His practical response to the situation was to climb down a manhole and flip a switch.

Matteo Salvini, Italy's populist deputy prime minister, is expecting Krajewski to pay the outstanding arrears.

"I expect that the pope's almoner, who intervened to turn the power back on in an occupied building in Rome, will also pay the 300,000 euros in back bills."

As papal almoner, Krajewski is responsible for distributing donations to those in need on behalf of Pope Francis. Other initiatives he has carried out include providing a dormitory, barber services and showers for those in need.

Source

• Rome Reports
• Catholic Herald
• Euro News
• Image: America Magazine

Ramping up his message ahead of the European elections, Bannon said Francis should stay out of politics.

"He's the administrator of the church, and he's also a politician. This is the problem," Bannon - who lives in Italy - said.

"He's constantly putting all the faults in the world on the populist nationalist movement."

The Pope's remarks about social justice have long irked Bannon and those of his ideological mindset.

Swing back to April 2016, when Bannon suggested Matteo Salvini should start openly targeting Francis about migration, because Francis has made the plight of refugees a cornerstone of his papacy. (At that time, Salvini was the minister for the interior and the leader of Italy's anti-immigration League party.)

"Bannon advised [Salvini] ... the pope is a sort of enemy. He suggested for sure to attack, frontally," a senior League insider says.

Salvini became more outspoken against the pope, claiming conservatives in the Vatican were on his side.

As an example, on 6 May 2016, after the pope's plea for compassion towards migrants, Salvini said: "Uncontrolled immigration, an organised and financed invasion, brings chaos and problems, not peace."

Salvini - who is now the Deputy Prime Minister of Italy's coalition cabinet - says he wants to bring the far right from across Europe into an alliance.

Last week, only days after meeting Bannon in Rome, Salvini revealed his "vision of Europe for the next 50 years", calling it the launch of a new right-wing coalition for the European parliamentary elections on 23 May.

Some say the timing of Italy's new coalition and Salvini's meeting with Bannon suggest Salvini has been handpicked as the informal leader of Eurosceptic populist forces in Europe.

According to Mischaël Modrikamen, the Movement's managing director, six months ago Bannon and Salvini tweeted that Italy's deputy prime minister "is in!"

Bannon also takes issue with the pope's warnings over resurgent populist movements.

"You can go around Europe and it's [populism] catching fire and the pope is just dead wrong," he says.

After Salvini and Bannon's 2016 meeting, Salvini was photographed holding up a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: "Benedict is my pope."

The slogan refers to a Vatican version of the "birther" campaign waged by Trump against Barack Obama, claiming that Francis's papacy is illegitimate and that his predecessor Benedict XVI is the true pontiff.

The League source also alleged that Salvini would have attacked the pope harder but was restrained by his own party, predominantly by Giancarlo Giorgetti, the deputy federal secretary of Lega Nord who is close to senior figures in the Vatican.

Bannon has been building opposition to Francis through his Dignitatis Humanae Institute, based in a 13th-century mountaintop monastery not far from Rome.

In January 2017, Bannon became a patron of the institute, whose honorary president is Cardinal Raymond Burke, who believes organised networks of homosexuals are spreading a "gay agenda" in the Vatican.

The institute's chairman is former Italian MP Luca Volontè, who is presently on trial for corruption for accepting bribes from Azerbaijan. He has denied all charges.

Source

• The Guardian
• The Telegraph
• Image: Daily Express