Right-wing extremists are strongly condemned after a funeral service at the Catholic Church of St. Lucia in Rome this week. Pictures taken outside the church show a coffin swamped in the swastika flag. Around the coffin are a few dozen listeners who made Nazi salutes to honor the dead.
Italian press has identified the deceased as a former 44-year-old member of the right-wing extremist group Forza Nuova.
Both Jewish and Catholic leaders in Italy condemn the use of the swastika flag and describe the incident as scandalous, reports CNN.
– The priest was completely ignorant
The Catholic Archdiocese of Rome states in a statement that the priests in St. Lucia, including the priest who conducted the ceremony inside the church, were completely unaware that the coffin was to be wrapped in a swastika flag outside the church, writes The Guardian.
The Archdiocese further emphasizes in the statement that the swastika flag is a terrible symbol that is completely incompatible with Christianity. The action is also described as “offensive” and “unacceptable”.
– Svastika symbolizes first and foremost Nazism and Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, editor’s note). It is an ancient Indian symbol that was picked up by the Nazis. While the Italian fascist flag consisted of an eagle standing on a bundle of rice with an ax. Italian neo-Nazis are thus a little different than Italian fascists, says historian in Civita, Bård Larsen, to Nettavisen.
Distances himself from every word, gesture and symbol
Alessandro Zenobbi, a priest in the Church of St. Lucia, is quoted as saying that he completely dissociates himself from “every word, gesture and symbol used outside the church, which is attributed to extremist ideologies that are far removed from the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The Jewish community in Rome is appalled that such events can still take place 70 years after World War II and the fall of the fascist dictatorship in Italy.
– It is unacceptable that a swastika flag can still be displayed in public in today’s society, and especially in a city that experienced the deportation of the city’s Jews by Nazis with the help of their fascist accomplices (Italian fascists editor’s note), reads the statement.
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On October 16, 1943, more than 1,000 Jews were deported to Rome. The vast majority were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Only 16 of them returned. Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was a close ally of the Nazis in Germany.
– Mussolini’s Italian fascism was in many ways the forerunner of Nazism, and arose several years before Hitler was noticed. Italian fascism is associated with another type of fascism that is not as military and anti-Semitic as German Nazism, says Larsen.
– Became a bigger room for right-wing extremism in Europe
A similar incident that took place outside St. Lucia’s Church on Monday also took place outside another church in Rome in March last year. Larsen says right-wing extremism has become more widespread in Europe in recent years.
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– In general, Italy has a long tradition of neo-fascism. So that in itself is not that sensational. But there has generally been more room for right-wing extremism in Europe. The general trend is that right-wing extremism is less sensational today than it was not so many years ago. And it has to do with several things. First and foremost, an American presidency has been a door opener for the far right, without me having any statistics behind me to cover just that, but it seems obvious when you look at events such as Charlottesville in the USA, says Larsen.
Larsen refers to the incident in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, when a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi drove into a peaceful group of protesters and killed a woman. The peaceful counter-demonstration was directed at hundreds of far-right supporters protesting the removal of a General Robert E. Lee statue.
Then-President Donald Trump received massive criticism for the way he handled the incident, and that he did not distance himself enough from the right-wing extremist forces.
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