The Vatican and the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) have expressed “shock and sadness” after a European Court of Human Rights ruled that state schools in Italy must remove crucifixes from classroom walls.

The Strasbourg-based court, in a unanimous decision reached on Tuesday, said the presence of crucifixes “could be encouraging for [Christian] religious pupils, but also disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists, particularly if they belonged to religious minorities”. A chamber of seven judges (from Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Lithuania, Serbia, Hungary and Turkey) said: “The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by public authorities, especially in classrooms, thus restricted the rights of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions and the right of children to believe or not believe.”

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi called the decision “wrong and myopic”. He said it was “grave to try to marginalise from the educational system a fundamental sign of the importance of religious values in our history and in Italian culture”. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, said of the Stasbourg court ruling: “This Europe of the third millennium leaves us only with [Halloween] pumpkins and takes away our most precious symbols.” The CEI said the crucifix was not just a religious symbol but also a cultural sign, and part of the historic patrimony of the Italian people.

Most Italian political leaders, with the exception of some left-wing politicians, also criticised the court’s decision. The Italian Government said it would appeal against the ruling. The Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano commented: “The ruling strikes at the [symbol] that most represents a great tradition, that is not just religious, of the European continent.”

The plaintiff in the case – Soile Lautsi, a Finnish-born woman who is an Italian citizen – filed her complaint with the European Court in July 2006. But she had already begun her legal battle four years earlier in the court system by protesting against the presence of crucifixes in the state school in Abano Terme near Padua where her 11-year-old and 13-year-old children were students. Ms Lautsi, a member of the Italian Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics, argued that the principle of secularism by which she wished to raise her children was being violated.

But on five occasions Italian authorities ruled against Ms Lautsi. In March 2005 the court threw out her complaint, saying the crucifix was both the symbol of Italian history and culture, and consequently of Italian identity. In February 2006 the Consiglio di Stato dismissed her appeal, saying the crucifix had become one of the signs of the secular values of the Italian constitution and of civic life.

But in their ruling the seven judges at the Strasbourg court said that placing crucifixes in state schools violated Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 (the right to education) and Article 9 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Meanwhile, the Italian daily La Repubblica reported on Wednesday that Pope Benedict XVI has asked the Pontifical Council for the Laity to organise an international gathering of Catholic politicians and civic leaders for next year to re-propose the Church’s view on the family, defence of life, Christian roots, schools and bioethics.