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It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.

But when one identifies the Church with a cultural and political bloc, there is the danger of making difficult the Church's contact with all those outside the bloc.

It is evident that the Church is always abandoning more the old traditional structures of European life and, therefore, is changing its appearance and living new forms in itself. It's clear most of all that the de-Christianization of Europe is progressing, that the Christian element is always vanishing more from the fabric of society.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

Ten years ago, 15 years ago, I think the church would have been asleep at the switch. This level of activism and engagement with the needs of society by local churches I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.

I hope that by going to visit the pope I have enabled everybody to see that the words Catholic and Protestant, as ordinarily used, are completely out of date. They are almost always used now purely for propaganda purposes. That is why so much trouble is caused by them.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.

I hope that my government can help change Italian mentality.

As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.