ITALY:AFTER A HARD week pushing for a change in the law to halt his current corruption trial, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi set his sights even higher at the weekend by demanding the Catholic Church kill off a rule that stops him taking Communion because he is divorced and remarried.
Evidently on a roll and wearing a white panama hat, a relaxed-looking Mr Berlusconi sat in the front row at a service in a church near his Sardinian villa on Saturday as the bishop approached the congregation to offer Communion.
"When are you going to change this rule that stops me taking Communion?" Mr Berlusconi asked the startled bishop, who had been planning to move swiftly past the prime minister without stopping to pop a wafer in his mouth.
Until now, the Italian prime minister and media mogul has remained an unwavering supporter of the Vatican's policy of promoting family values and attacking single-sex unions.
Mr Berlusconi showed up at last year's church-run Family Day march in Rome, prompting critics to joke that he was well qualified since he had so many families of his own. Earlier this month, after kissing Pope Benedict on the hand at a meeting at the Vatican, Mr Berlusconi said: "We are on the church's side." He added: "The outlook of my government cannot but please the pope and the church."
By Saturday, after a week spent seeking to suspend his trial for allegedly bribing the British lawyer David Mills while preparing a blanket law that would give himself immunity from all prosecution, Mr Berlusconi perhaps thought it was time to try his luck with the church.
The embarrassed bishop, Sebastiano Sanguinetti, hinted he could have worked something out in private with Mr Berlusconi, but he was not about to provoke a scandal by giving him communion in front of watching journalists.
"I told him he could take the matter to a higher level, given that he has just been received by the pope at the Vatican," Bishop Sanguinetti told the daily La Stampa.
Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, the newly appointed president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said that even the pope might not be able to help out. "It is not within our power to change the mandate of the Lord," he told Il Giornale,a newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family.