The president of Italy's powerful Catholic bishops' conference (CEI) this week issued an unusually harsh and wide-ranging denunciation of the country's social and moral ills, in what some political analysts here said was an attempt to help bring down the centre-left government.

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, in a meeting with senior CEI officials on Monday in Rome, described Italy as "frayed and fragmented" and said "blocked economic growth" and "bad politics" had filled Italians with "fear of the future and a sense of fatalistic decline".

His comments came as the recently resigned Justice Minister, Clemente Mastella, and his small Catholic centrist party, UDEUR, said they were breaking ranks with the governing coalition. It was believed that without their support Prime Minister Romano Prodi's 20-month-old Government would not survive a vote of confidence on Thursday in the Italian Senate.

Cardinal Bagnasco has generally used measured and pastoral tones since becoming CEI president last March, but on Monday his 12-page address had the ominous tenor routinely employed by his long-serving predecessor, the politically active Cardinal Camillo Ruini.

Cardinal Bagnasco also surprised even Catholic commentators when he dramatically changed his approach regarding Pope Benedict XVI's cancelled 18 January visit to Rome's La Sapienza University. Abandoning the conciliatory declarations he had made days earlier, he blamed the Government for the cancellation on Monday. The cardinal first denounced the "grave episode of intolerance" and "climate of hostility" surrounding the papal visit, then condemned the Government for "suggesting" the Vatican renounce the visit on security grounds. The Interior Ministry and the Prime Minister's office immediately issued an unprecedented and terse denial, saying it had guaranteed the "Pope's safety" and "public order".

The La Sapienza affair became a hot national issue, with most of the political establishment declaring its solidarity with the Pope. Right-wing parties and militant Catholic groups used the incident to mount further attacks on the left-leaning Government and "secularist" groups that are most critical of what they see as the Vatican's and the Italian hierarchy's "interference" in state affairs.

Cardinal Ruini, the Vicar of Rome, urged Italians to go to St Peter's Square last Sunday to show their support for Pope Benedict.  More than 100,000 people - many of them Catholic schoolchildren, university students, and members of church movements - provided one of the largest crowds in memory for the noonday Angelus. But a "who's who" of Italy's political elite was also prominently present at the so-called "Papa Day". The Pope, visibly moved by the large turnout, thanked the crowd several times for the "show of solidarity". In a letter to parents and educators dated the following day, he continued to denounce the ills of Italian society. He said that there was an "emergency in education" caused by a mentality and a form of culture that led people to doubt the value of the human person and the goodness of life. He said, quoting St Paul's letter to the Ephesians, "we risk becoming, like the ancient pagans, people ‘without hope and without God in this world'''.

In his address on Monday Cardinal Bagnasco once again denounced civil unions, anti-discrimination measures for homosexuals, the "aberration of abortion" and "quick divorce" legislation. "One of the causes of the government crisis is the CEI," said the undersecretary for Justice, Luigi Manconi.

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