Posted on 10/02/2002 6:13:35 AM PDT by Tancred
ROME (Reuters) - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi came under fire Saturday from the Roman Catholic Church over an apparent quip made at the expense of illegal immigrants who drowned this month while trying to reach Italy.
Asked Friday why police had resorted to using a pedalo, a pedal-operated small boat, to recover the victims, Berlusconi replied: "It's not every day that they have to pick up corpses and sometimes pedalos work well. None of the (corpses) complained."
His comment was immediately denounced by opposition politicians, and Saturday the official Vatican newspaper weighed in.
"Sometimes spirited quips are not only out of place but also macabre, in bad taste and downright offensive," L'Osservatore Romano wrote in an editorial.
"It is inconceivable to be ironic about the dead."
About 35 Liberians drowned off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa on September 15 after their boat capsized in heavy seas.
Italians were later shocked to see photos of police setting off in a pedalo to recover some of the bodies.
"Perhaps you would have preferred it if the bodies had been picked up in a big boat," Berlusconi told a reporter at Friday's news conference.
Berlusconi's center-right government has just toughened its immigration laws in an effort to deter the thousands of men and women who flee to Italy from the Third World every year in search of a better life in the West.
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