mercoledì 31 marzo 2010

Papa: Vaticano attacca New York Times

31 Marzo 2010 17:23 CRONACHE

CITTA' DEL VATICANO - Radio Vaticana oggi ha lanciato un attacco contro il New York Times per i suoi articoli sul Papa ritenuti inattendibili e imprecisi. La Radio ha tratto le sue informazioni dal memoriale di padre Thomas Brundage, vicario giudiziale dell'arcidiocesi di Milwauke dal 1995 al 2003 e dunque presidente del collegio giudicante che avvio' il processo contro il prete pedofilo Lawrence Murphy, morto nel 1998. "Padre Brundage - riferisce l'emittente - accusa il quotidiano di aver fatto una ricostruzione assolutamente imprecisa e sciatta della vicenda, fondandosi tra l'altro sulle menzogne di mons. Rembert Weakland". (RCD)

Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?


Maureen Dowd
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Published: March 30, 2010

It doesn’t seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin.

Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse culture of protecting molesters and the church’s reputation rather than abused — and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged — children.

The church gave up its credibility for Lent. Holy Thursday and Good Friday are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday.

This week of special confessions and penance services is unfolding as the pope resists pressure from Catholics around the globe for his own confession and penance about the cascade of child sexual abuse cases that were ignored, even by a German diocese and Vatican office he ran.

If church fund-raising and contributions dry up, Benedict’s P.R. handlers may yet have to stage a photo-op where he steps out of the priest’s side of the confessional and enters the side where the rest of his fallible flock goes.

Or maybe 30-second spots defending the pope with Benedict’s voice intoning at the end: “I am infallible, and I approve this message.”

Canon 1404 states that “The First See is judged by no one.” But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as my dad used to say. Somebody has to tell the First See when it’s blind — and mute — to deaf children in America and Italy.

The Vatican is surprised to find itself in this sort of trouble. Officials there could have easily known what was going on all along; archbishops visiting Rome gossip like a sewing circle. The cynical Vatican just didn’t want to deal with it.

And now the church continues to hide behind its mystique. Putting down the catechism, it picked up the Washington P.R. handbook for political sins.

First: Declare any new revelation old and unimportant.

At Palm Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York bemoaned that the “recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin, has knocked us to our knees once again.”

A few priests? At this point, it feels like an international battalion.

A re-run of an old story? So sorry to remind you, Archbishop, that one priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who showed no remorse and suffered no punishment from “Rottweiler” Ratzinger, abused as many as 200 deaf children in Wisconsin.

Archbishop Dolan compared the pope to Jesus, saying he was “now suffering some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob, and scourging at the pillar,” and “being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.”

Second: Blame somebody else — even if it’s this pope’s popular predecessor, on the fast track to sainthood.

Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn defended Pope Benedict this week, saying that then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s attempt in 1995 to investigate the former archbishop of Vienna for allegedly molesting youths in a monastery was barred by advisers close to Pope John Paul II.

Third: Say black is white.

In his blog, Archbishop Dolan blasted church critics while stating: “The Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it ourselves,” adding: “We do not expect any special treatment. ...so bring it on.” Right.

Fourth: Demonize gays, as Karl Rove did in 2004.

In an ad in The Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, offered this illumination: “The Times continues to editorialize about the ‘pedophilia crisis,’ when all along it’s been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.”

Donohue is still talking about the problem as an indiscretion rather than a crime. If it mostly involves men and boys, that’s partly because priests for many years had unquestioned access to boys.

Fifth: Blame the victims.

“Fr. Lawrence Murphy apparently began his predatory behavior in Wisconsin in the 1950s,” Donohue protested, “yet the victims’ families never contacted the police until the mid-1970s.”

Sixth: Throw gorilla dust.

Donohue asserts that “the common response of all organizations, secular as well as religious,” to abuse cases “was to access therapy and reinstate the patient.” Really? Where in heaven’s name does that information come from? It’s absurd.

And finally, seventh: Use the Cheney omnipotence defense, most famously employed in the Valerie Plame case. Vice President Cheney claimed that his lofty position meant that the very act of spilling a secret, even with dastardly intent, declassified it.

Vatican lawyers will argue in negligence cases brought by abuse victims that the pope has immunity as a head of state and that bishops who allowed an abuse culture, endlessly recirculating like dirty fountain water, were not Vatican employees.

Maybe they worked for Enron.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/opinion/31dowd.html?scp=1&sq=Ratzinger&st=cse

Berlusconi's bounce


Italy's regional elections

A surprisingly good result for Italy's prime minister

Mar 30th 2010 | ROME | From The Economist online

REGIONAL elections on March 28th-29th made several things clear about today’s Italy. The first was that it is not France. Defying predictions, the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, did not get a trouncing at the polls of the kind President Nicolas Sarkozy suffered recently.

Of the 13 regions at stake, Mr Berlusconi’s conservative People of Freedom (PdL) movement took six, regaining four of them from the left. This was a strong performance for the prime minister. The opposition had everything in its favour: a string of sex scandals involving Mr Berlusconi last year; a display, in late February, of extraordinary ineptitude by the PdL when it failed to deliver its list of candidates on time in Lazio, the region that includes Rome, and an economic crisis that last year slashed GDP by 5.1% and destroyed more than 400,000 jobs. One poll conducted two weeks before the election had predicted the left holding all but one of the 11 regions that it won in 2005.

The Democratic Party (PD), Italy’s biggest opposition group, did at least narrow the gap with the PdL. Partial results suggested the distance between the parties could be as little as 1%, compared with more than 4% at the 2008 general election. And the left could claim that its vote was eroded in at least one marginal region by the Five-Star Movement, a new outfit led by Beppe Grillo, an anti-Berlusconi comedian and blogger. Mr Grillo’s party had an impressive first outing, winning almost 7% in the left’s heartland of Emilia-Romagna.

Yet this was a disappointing result for the left. It lost four of its 11 governorships, and might well have lost another, Puglia, had the right there held together. In Campania, the region around Naples, the opposition’s share of the vote plunged from 62% to 43%—a damning judgment on ten years of left-wing administration. The left also failed to hold Lazio, despite fielding a strong candidate: Emma Bonino, a former European commissioner.

What went wrong? The mainstream opposition is clearly still incapable of capitalising on the dissatisfaction felt towards the government by many parts of the electorate, particularly the young. Instead of supporting the PD or the smaller, feistier Italy of Principles (IDV) movement, many voters stayed at home. Only 64% bothered to vote, almost 8% fewer than five years ago. And contrary to expectations, the right was not the only victim of the low turnout.

The other explanation for the turnaround is even more disquieting for the left. Two weeks before voting, Mr Berlusconi took to the hustings, and his personal charisma may have tilted the balance. The prime minister was not slow to draw conclusions, reportedly telling aides that in Lazio he had wrought a “sort of miracle”.

But there is a cloud on Mr Berlusconi's horizon: the success of his ally, Umberto Bossi, whose populist, xenophobic Northern League was the one undisputed victor of these elections. The party won 13% of the vote, up from 8% at the general election, and took the governorships of two northern regions, Veneto and Piedmont. Mr Bossi promptly announced he would press for greater financial autonomy for the north as the price of his continued support. This is unlikely to be the last demand he will make of the prime minister.

As for Mr Berlusconi, he will doubtless see the result as a mandate for his continued attempts to curb the criminal prosecutors who have pursued him since before he entered politics 16 years ago. He may also view the outcome as legitimising his aspiration to a presidential style of government. How far he gets down either of these roads may now depend less on the opposition than on Mr Bossi.

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15810534

Berlusconi has got one thing right: his finance minister

Bronwen Maddox

Giulio Tremonti took Italy out of crisis and voters should thank his boss


From The Times - March 31, 2010
(Bronwen Maddox is Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times)

I t’s been years since I thought I could write a word in favour of Silvio Berlusconi. The girls, swimming pools full of them; the suffocating control of Italy’s media; the endless speeches about reform that never happens. I’d long concluded that Italy would be better without a Prime Minister who had become the story rather than the agent of change.

That is still my view. But I have to admit two points. First, many Italians back him. Yesterday his conservative coalition won four regions from the opposition in local elections, despite predictions that it would lose. There is no choice but to credit some of that to the “Mediterranean man” factor, as Italian pundits call it. Voters forgive or even admire him for behaviour that would disqualify him from British politics, never mind the puritanical US.

His spokesman says, baldly: “Divorce happens to many people, even nice ones,” glossing over the provocations that led Veronica Lario, Mr Berlusconi’s wife, to file for this particular divorce.

But a bigger reason for voters’ indulgence is that Italy has fared surprisingly well in the global financial turmoil. Let me be more precise — it is not that Mr Berlusconi has run the economy well, but that he appointed Giulio Tremonti as Finance Minister in May 2008 and had the wit to keep him in place. Mr Tremonti, a good candidate for Europe’s best finance minister, has turned a near-disastrous position into a survivable one.

Italy had seemed to be heading for the position of Greece: unable to trim its huge public sector or to persuade people to pay more tax, hemmed in by debt and in serious danger of showing that a country which had adopted the euro could crash out of the currency bloc. Asked how craftsmen in northern Italy would compete against cheap Chinese handbags and shoes, ministers would say weakly: “But we make nicer ones.”

No longer. Italy has navigated the two years without collapse in finances or huge panic about its debt. Mr Tremonti resisted Mr Berlusconi’s pressure to cut taxes or to launch a big stimulus. Did that make Italy a free rider on those countries who did these things? Sure, but Mr Tremonti was right that Italy couldn’t afford it. Its debt, at 115 per cent of gross domestic product, has been higher than Greece’s. But its budget deficit — the gap between government spending and income — is less than half of Greece’s, at less than 6 per cent of GDP.

Still not a breeze — and ministers have no good answer to the Chinese handbags question. Nor has Mr Berlusconi’s team begun to tackle desperately needed reforms. But Mr Tremonti has done enough to take Italy out of crisis. For that — but that alone — voters are justified in thanking Mr Tremonti’s boss.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/bronwen_maddox/article7081887.ece

domenica 28 marzo 2010

Pope Benedict XVI



Updated March 25, 2010

Overview

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected the Catholic church's 265th pope on April 19, 2005, after the death of the popular and long-serving Pope John Paul II. Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict XVI.

At 78, the German-born Benedict XVI was one of the oldest popes ever elected. His age and closeness to John Paul -- he served under him for more than two decades as guardian of church orthodoxy -- raised the question whether he would be only a transitional figure.

But the bookish and shy Benedict has to many experts proven himself no mere caretaker of the 2,000-year-old office, even if there is strong debate in the church about his vision.

The pope has had his share of difficulties, most recently, in a widening sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in Europe and the United States. Pope Benedict is facing accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer.

In 2006 he enraged many Muslims, when he quoted a Byzantine emperor who called Islam "evil and inhuman,'' and in January 2009 he sparked outrage across Europe when he revoked the excommunication of schismatic bishops who had denied central elements of the Holocaust.

On Oct. 20, 2009, in a bold move expected to cause confusion within Anglican and Catholic parishes alike, the pope approved the Vatican's decision to make it easier for Anglicans to convert. Many Anglicans have been uncomfortable with the Church of England's acceptance of women priests and openly gay bishops

Before becoming pope, Benedict had expressed his ideas with force over many years in dozens of books and lectures.

Central to those ideas is how the Catholic church -- and religious belief generally -- finds its place in a modern, secular society. His own answer has been to rein in what he sees as the excesses in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, which were aimed at bringing the church closer to ordinary Catholic life. He encourages a church of the most orthodox believers -- the better, he believes, to ensure the church's survival in what he believes is a hostile culture as mass attendance has declined steeply in developed countries.

His many critics in the church call his approach narrow and regressive, removing it from life as it is actually lived and stifling a debate they say would move the church forward as it grapples with a global role in a multicultural world.

In general, the pope's actions in office have tended more toward pleasing the church's conservative wing, easing restrictions on saying the Latin mass and restating his contentious belief that Catholicism is the only "true" church.

Fallout from Abuse Scandals

Benedict's central goals of fortifying the church and fighting secularism in Europe have been threatened by hundreds of new allegations of sexual abuse by priests surfacing throughout Europe and the United States.

Benedict himself was drawn into an abuse scandal in his native Germany. A senior church official in early 2010 acknowledged that a German archdiocese had made "serious mistakes" in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.

The archdiocese said a priest, who was accused of molesting boys, was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties before committing further abuse and being prosecuted and convicted. Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, had approved the priest's transfer for therapy. The priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, has a trail of accusations against him that suggest a pattern of abuse of over two decades.

Experts said the scandal has cast a shadow over the Vatican and could undermine Benedict's moral authority. As head of the Vatican's main doctrinal arm, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he led Vatican investigations into abuse for four years before assuming the papacy in 2005.

In another case, documents emerged in March 2010 that top Vatican officials, including the future pope, did not defrock an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit,

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The abuse scandals have put to the test a Vatican culture of protecting its own even in the face of crimes against civil and canon law.

Old-School Intellectual

Benedict, an old-school European intellectual, does not fit seamlessly into the American model of conservatism, though American conservatives are among his strong supporters, heartened by his opposition to abortion, divorce and "anything-goes" multiculturalism. For instance, Benedict opposed the war in Iraq, rejects the death penalty, denounces the excesses of capitalism and focuses strongly on helping the poor and immigrants.

Beyond the liberal-conservative debate, Benedict has worked to reunite Roman Catholics with Orthodox Christians, divided for 1,000 years, and open formal relations with China. He also speaks out often on the plight of Christian minorities in Muslim countries, as Christians disappear from the lands where the faith began.

Despite his quiet demeanor, Benedict has not shrunk from controversy even outside the church. In 2006, he enflamed Muslims in a speech in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor as calling Islam "evil and inhuman." The pope later apologized, saying that his words were misunderstood and pledging a focused interfaith dialogue with Muslims, which began in 2008.

A new controversy erupted in January 2009, after the pope revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops from the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X, including Bishop Richard Williamson, a Briton. Bishop Richardson, in an interview broadcast on a Swedish television channel, had denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and said he believed that no more than 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust rather than the accepted figure of 6 million.

Global outrage was immediate. In a rare criticism from the head of a government, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany called on the pope to clarify his position on the Holocaust, saying his previous remarks had not been sufficient.

Responding to the reaction, on Feb. 5, 2009, the Vatican called on the bishop to take back his statements denying the Holocaust. On Feb. 12, the pope, trying to defuse the controversy, said that "any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable," especially if it comes from a clergyman.

In late February 2009, Bishop Williamson apologized to the pope, the church and "survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich." But he did not address the substance of his views on the Holocaust or disavow his remarks. The Vatican said that the apology was not sufficient.

The following month, the pope sent a letter to bishops worldwide explaining why he revoked Bishop Williamson's excommunication and admitting mistakes in how the Vatican handled the case. In the letter, the pope said that he had considered his action "a modest act of mercy" but that it suddenly appeared something totally different -- "as the denial of reconciliation between Christians and Jews."

Critical of the Global Economy

In May, the pope traveled to the Mideast, arriving in Jordan before traveling to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Vatican officials said the pope was eager to make the trip, given his age, 82.

But his first day in Israel seemed to underscore the tensions in the region rather than ease them. After the pope visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and offered the "deep compassion" of the Roman Catholic Church for Hitler's victims, Jewish leaders expressed disappointment that the pontiff, who is German, had not mentioned Germany or the Nazis.

Later, at an interfaith meeting where the pope urged greater dialogue, Sheik Taysir Tamimi, the chief justice of the Palestinian Islamic courts, veered from the program and accused Israel of taking innocent lives.

In July 2009, after more than two years in preparation, Benedict released "Caritas in Veritate," or "Charity in Truth," his third encyclical since he became pope in 2005. In it, the pope called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a "true world political authority" to oversee the economy and work for the "common good."

He criticized the current economic system, "where the pernicious effects of sin are evident," and urged financiers in particular to "rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity."

Reportedly delayed to take into consideration the financial crisis, it was released by the Vatican on the eve of the Group of 8 industrialized nations summit meeting in July 2009.

In many ways, the document was a puzzling cross between an anti-globalization tract and a government white paper, another signal that the Vatican does not comfortably fit into traditional political categories of right and left.

Benedict also called for "greater social responsibility" on the part of business. "Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty," he wrote.

Benedict approved the Vatican's decision in October 2009 to reach out to disaffected Anglicans. The move creates a formal structure to oversee conversions that had previously been evaluated on a case-by-case basis, including those of married Anglican priests, who are permitted to remain married after they convert to Catholicism. Under the new regime, former Anglicans who become Catholic can preserve some liturgical elements of the Anglican Mass.

Benedict has announced that he will travel to England in 2010. The trip will be the first official diplomatic visit, rather than pastoral visit, by a pontiff.

http://www.nytimes.com/info/pope-benedict-xvi/



A Papal Conversion

Published: March 27, 2010

IN light of recent revelations, Pope Benedict XVI now seems to symbolize the tremendous failure by the Catholic Church to crack down on the sexual abuse of children. Both the pope’s brief stint as a bishop in Germany 30 years ago and his quarter-century as a top Vatican official are being scoured for records of abusive priests whom he failed to stop, and each case seems to strengthen the indictment.

For example, considerable skepticism surrounds the Vatican’s insistence that in 1980 the pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich, was unaware of a decision to transfer a known pedophile priest to his diocese and give him duties in a parish. In some ways, the question of what he knew at the time is almost secondary, since it happened on his watch and ultimately he has to bear the responsibility. However, all the criticism is obscuring something equally important: For anyone who knows the Vatican’s history on this issue, Benedict XVI isn’t just part of the problem. He’s also a major chapter in the solution.

To understand that, it’s necessary to wind the clock back a decade. Before then, no Vatican office had clear responsibility for cases of priests accused of sexual abuse, which instead were usually handled — and often ignored — at the diocesan level. In 2001, however, Pope John Paul II assigned responsibility to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s all-important doctrinal office, which was headed by Joseph Ratzinger, then a cardinal.

As a result, bishops were required to send their case files to Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. By all accounts, he studied them with care, making him one of the few churchmen anywhere in the world to have read the documentation on virtually every Catholic priest accused of sexual abuse. The experience gave him a familiarity with the pervasiveness of the problem that virtually no other figure in the Catholic Church can claim. And driven by that encounter with what he would later refer to as “filth” in the church, Cardinal Ratzinger seems to have undergone a transformation. From that point forward, he and his staff were determined to get something done.

One crucial issue Cardinal Ratzinger had to resolve was how to handle the church’s internal disciplinary procedures for abusive priests. Early on, reformers worried that Rome would insist on full trials in church courts before a priest could be removed from ministry or defrocked. Those trials were widely seen as slow, cumbersome and uncertain, yet many in the Vatican thought they were needed to protect the due process rights of the accused.

In the end, Cardinal Ratzinger and his team approved direct administrative action in roughly 60 percent of the cases. Having sorted through the evidence, they concluded that in most cases swift action was more important than preserving the church’s legal formalities.

Among Vatican insiders, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith became the primary force pushing for a tough response to the crisis. Other departments sometimes regarded the “zero tolerance” policy as an over-reaction, not to mention a distortion of the church’s centuries-long legal tradition, in which punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and in which bishops and other superiors have great leeway in meting out discipline.

After being elected pope, Benedict made the abuse cases a priority. One of his first acts was to discipline two high-profile clerics against whom sex abuse allegations had been hanging around for decades, but had previously been protected at the highest levels.

He is also the first pope ever to meet with victims of abuse, which he did in the United States and Australia in 2008. He spoke openly about the crisis some five times during his 2008 visit to the United States. And he became the first pope to devote an entire document to the sex-abuse crisis, his pastoral letter to Ireland.

What we are left with are two distinct views of the scandal. The outside world is outraged, rightly, at the church’s decades of ignoring the problem. But those who understand the glacial pace at which change occurs in the Vatican understand that Benedict, admittedly late in the game but more than any other high-ranking official, saw the gravity of the situation and tried to steer a new course.

Be that as it may, Benedict now faces a difficult situation inside the church. From the beginning, the sexual abuse crisis has been composed of two interlocking but distinct scandals: the priests who abused, and the bishops who failed to clean it up. The impact of Benedict’s post-2001 conversion has been felt mostly at that first level, and he hasn’t done nearly as much to enforce new accountability measures for bishops.

That, in turn, is what makes revelations about his past so potentially explosive. Can Benedict credibly ride herd on other bishops if his own record, at least before 2001, is no better? The church’s legitimacy rests in large part on that question.

Yet to paint Benedict XVI as uniquely villainous doesn’t do justice to his record. The pope may still have much ground to cover, but he deserves credit for how far he’s come.

John L. Allen Jr. is the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter and the author of “The Rise of Benedict XVI.”


sabato 27 marzo 2010

The Document Trail: The Predator Priest Who Got Away



http://documents.nytimes.com/reverend-lawrence-c-murphy-abuse-case?ref=europe#document

Pope May Be at Crossroads on Abuse, Forced to Reconcile Policy and Words

Memo to Pope Described Transfer of Pedophile Priest

lunedì 22 marzo 2010

Silvio Berlusconi to push for change to Italian constitution for greater powers

From The Times - March 22, 2010

Richard Owen, Rome

The Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is proposing to change the constitution by referendum to give him greater powers as a “directly elected president”.

Addressing supporters of his People of Liberty (PdL) party at a rally in Rome, Mr Berlusconi said that he planned a “great, great, great reform” in the remaining three years of his term.

This would include changes to the judiciary, which he claims is biased against him, a cut in the number of MPs and senators and direct elections for a head of state with expanded powers.

The president is currently elected by Parliament, and has limited powers. Mr Berlusconi did not say whether he would be a candidate but the Italian press said that the announcement was consistent with his populist belief that “the people” supported him despite the “lies” spread by “magistrates and the press”.

PdL officials said that more than a million people attended the rally in Rome, staged under the slogan “Love always wins over envy and hatred” to the soundtrack from Star Wars.

However, police put the turnout at 150,000 — fewer than the crowds that attended a centre-left, anti-Berlusconi rally a week previously.

New opinion polls show that Mr Berlusconi’s approval rating has slipped to 44 per cent from 62 per cent when he was elected to his third term a year and a half ago.

Last week the Prime Minister addressed a half-empty hall at an election rally in Naples.

Mr Berlusconi’s standing could suffer another blow if centre-right voters abstain in elections in 13 regions next weekend after the PdL bungled the registration of its candidates in Lazio, the region around Rome. It missed the deadline because a party official went out for a sandwich.

Questions were also raised over the validity of signatures accompanying the PdL list in Mr Berlusconi’s native Lombardy region.

At first the Prime Minister turned on “idiots” in his party but later blamed the Left for “dirty tricks”.

Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of the opposition Democratic Party, said that Mr Berlusconi was increasingly “nervous” because “he knows the tide is turning against him”.

Renato Mannheimer, Italy’s top pollster, said: “The centre-right electorate is disoriented and has lost confidence in its leaders, whom they see as disorganised.”

Magistrates are investigating Mr Berlusconi for abuse of office after tapped phone conversations indicated that he had interfered to try to block his critics from appearing on talk shows and news bulletins not only on his Mediaset television network but also on programmes of RAI, the public broadcaster.

At the Rome rally, outside the Basilica of St John Lateran, Mr Berlusconi said that “leftist” judges and politicians had concocted “a laughable investigation based on the tapping of my calls.

“Do you want phone taps on everyone and everything? Do you want to be spied on in your own homes?” he asked the crowd — which roared back, “No”.

“We don’t often take to the streets but it was absolutely necessary to defend ourselves from the attacks of the Left and its magistrates,” Mr Berlusconi told his supporters.

“We are here to have our right to vote guaranteed. With you, love and freedom will win.”

Ministers and PdL regional candidates attended the Rome rally. However, Gianfranco Fini, the Speaker of the Lower House and co-founder of the party — who has distanced himself from the Prime Minister and is seen as his most likely challenger — did not take part, saying that his institutional position prevented him from doing so. He is to launch a new movement in May called Generation Italy.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7070477.ece