Italian Bishop under Police Protection after Threats

Genoa's Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian bishops' conference, has been placed under police protection after homosexual activists spray-painted death threats against the senior church official across the city, the BBC reported April 10.

Archbishop Bagnasco recently issued a strongly-worded condemnation of the government's proposal to give legal rights to unmarried couples in civil unions, including homosexual pairs.

"Why not say no to various forms of living together, to the creating of alternative forms of the family?" Archbishop Bagnasco said, warning that legalization of homosexual unions would make it difficult to prevent the further breakdown of family life and sexual morality, reported Spero News. "Why not say no to the incest of a brother and a sister who live together and have children in Great Britain? Why not say no to the party of pederasts in Holland?"

Following his remarks, "Shame on you, Bagnasco" was scrawled on the doors of his cathedral, and last weekend the words "Death to Bagnasco" were spray-painted on nearby churches, along with insults against Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the previous head of the Italian bishops' conference.

The Communist hammer and sickle and the five-pointed start of the left-wing Red Brigades terrorist group accompanied the threat.

The police posted an officer at the Bishop's offices and increased the number of armed patrols in the area. During Easter Sunday Mass, plain-clothes officers stationed themselves among parishioners in the cathedral.

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