Public sentiment and political rhetoric is hardening against migrants in Italy, and legislators are proposing to restrict their rights radically. This means that the Vatican, bishops and church charities are set on a collision course with the Italian state, host of the G8 Summit

"Dying of Hope" was the title of an ecumenical prayer service held in the Rome Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere on 25 June to remember all those who have died attempting to flee to Europe from poverty, hunger or oppression.

The president of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerant Peoples, Archbishop Antonio Maria Vegliò, presided at the event, which was jointly organised for the third consecutive year by the Sant'Egidio lay community, the Italian branch of Caritas, the Jesuit-run Centro Astalli, the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy and the national Christian Workers Association.

In the first four months of this year alone, some 350 men, women and children have drowned trying to cross the stormy strait between North Africa and Sicily. Conservative estimates for the number of victims who have lost their lives while attempting to enter Europe over the past two decades have reached almost 15,000.

The prayer service was held to mark World Refugee Day and to draw attention to a situ­ation which many religious and human rights organisations say has reached crisis point here in Italy. Days earlier Pope Benedict himself had prayed for the "difficult and sometimes dramatic situation of refugees". He noted during his visit to Padre Pio's shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo that "there are many people who seek refuge in other countries fleeing from situations of war, persecution and disasters, and their reception poses many difficulties, yet it is nevertheless a duty".

But just a week earlier, Italy's lower house of parliament passed a bill proposing harsh fines (up to 10,000 euros) for immigrants who are caught without the correct documents and a jail sentence for anyone offering accommodation to "illegal" immigrants. The proposed law (expected to be passed by the Senate this week) also increases the length of time that such immigrants can be kept in government holding centres from two to six months and, most controversially, contains provisions for a national framework enabling the setting up of "citizens" patrols - critics call them vigilante groups - to help authorities combat crime.

The Government of Silvio Berlusconi claims the measures are necessary to stem "clandestine immigration", which is increasingly being blamed by politicians and the press for Italy's rising crime rates. The inflammatory language and anti-immigrant rhetoric used by some members of parliament has been condemned by leading figures in the Church and secular society alike. Italy's mild-mannered President Giorgio Napolitano recently expressed concern over an increase in what he termed "xenophobic rhetoric" in public discourse. Inaugurating the general assembly of the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI), Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa reiterated criticism of the new anti-immigration policies, urging that the "value of every human life, its dignity and inalienable rights" should be the "fundamental criteria" with which to evaluate all migrants and asylum seekers.

Such anti-migrant attitudes seem to be taking their toll: in the past year several highly publicised rapes, allegedly committed by immigrants in Rome, Milan and Bologna, have been followed by mob violence and attacks on foreigners, including an Indian man who was beaten and set on fire by three youths at a station near Rome in February and a 63-year-old Ghanaian man who was severely beaten in a Milan park last autumn.

Up near the border with Switzerland, Italy's first black mayor, 47-year-old Sandy Cane, who had an African-American father and an Italian mother, makes an unlikely spokesman for the Northern League, the populist party that is driving the Government's crackdown on immigration. She says that "it's not racist to be against illegal immigration".
To her credit, Cane did describe as a "joke" comments by the Northern League secretary in Milan that the city should introduce a segregated rail transport system. She does, however, support Italy's newly adopted policy of intercepting boatloads of desperate immigrants attempting to reach Italian shores and forcing them back to Libya, from where most of the rickety vessels set out - a move condemned by both the Council of Europe and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres.

The new legislation seems set to worsen the migrants' plight by criminalising those seeking to work and discouraging their integration, forbidding them to marry, seek medical services or even give birth without the correct documentation. The Northern League is also proposing that doctors and nurses should report to police any patients who are found to be illegally in the country and that Italian and immigrant children should be taught in separate classrooms.

Despite Prime Minister Berlusconi's comments last May that his Government did not want to create a multi-ethnic country, the reality is that immigrants already make up an estimated 7 per cent of the population. With an ageing population and one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, the Italian economy is increasingly dependent on migrant labour in agriculture, industry and the service sectors.

Despite Italy's history as a nation of émigrés - more than four million of them left seeking a better life in the United States alone in the century between 1820 and 1920 - Italians seem more suspicious about a presumed "immigrant invasion" than anyone else in Europe. Surveys show that the majority believe newcomers have too many rights, are taking away jobs from Italians and are threatening the religious and cultural make-up of the country. This suspicion towards foreigners is reflected in one of the West's most restrictive citizenship laws: an immigrant has to live for 10 years in the country before being eligible to apply and children born here to immigrants are not guaranteed citizenship when they turn 18, even if they have lived in the country their entire lives.

Italy's only black member of parliament, Jean-Leonard Touadi, believes the rhetoric belittling immigrants and suggesting they are potential criminals has increased the climate of fear and mistrust: the term rumeni or "Romanians" is now widely used as an insult by Italians to denote any Eastern Europeans with criminal intentions, while one Northern League minister has publicly described Africans as "bingo bongos", without causing much of a stir in the Italian press.

Vatican and Italian church authorities are attempting to combat this rising tide of racism on several fronts: in his remarks for World Refugee Day, the Pope recalled the urgency of fighting poverty in the developing world, thus "removing the causes of such a sad phenomenon". Similarly the president of Caritas Internationalis, the global confederation of Catholic aid agencies, Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, constantly points to the moral responsibility of rich nations to honour their pledges of overseas aid and promote development in the poorest countries as a key way of slowing migration to their shores.

At the same time, Archbishop Vegliò, who took over as head of the Vatican's Council for Migrants in February this year, has spoken of the work that local churches in Italy must do to develop "pluri-ethnic or multicultural pastoral structures" that can respond to the challenges of integrating immigrant communities for the mutual enrichment of both sides. "Where dialogue with other faiths is considered an opportunity rather than an obstacle," he told Vatican Radio recently, "Christian identity emerges strengthened."

At grass-roots level the Church has long been in the front line, helping thousands of immigrants, just as it has always provided a lifeline to Italian down-and-outs. Religious congregations of women in particular have taken up the fight to help women trafficked into prostitution to get off the streets, providing safe houses, counselling and legal assistance as they try to rebuild their shattered lives.

Local Caritas branches are also committed to both emergency services and long-term support for immigrants - although the Government's proposed security package may mean they are now breaking the law by continuing to do so. As well as providing food, lodging and health care, Caritas Rome offers language and skills training, plus advice for those attempting to set up small businesses. In response to the current global economic crisis, which has hit the casual labour market hard, Caritas set up an "emporium" where clients are provided with tokens to stock up on basic food and other essential supplies.

Earlier this month Sant'Egidio president Marco Impagliazzo also expressed grave concerns over the proposed criminalisation of immigrants. The lay community first started raising the alarm over the plight of the relatively small number of immigrants in Italy back in 1979, and in 1982 the community set up the first school teaching Italian to foreigners to help them integrate into their host society, a project that has now been extended to other cities around the country.

While the first students were mainly African men, principally from Italy's short-lived former colonies in Somalia and Ethiopia, the schools now increasingly cater for women and include many immigrants from Eastern Europe, as well as from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The waiting lists at these schools, says Sant'Egidio, defies the widely held views of many Italians that most immigrants prefer to keep to themselves in cultural ghettos.

In 1985, following a bloody attack by Arab terrorists at Fiumicino airport, one of the founders of the community, Andrea Riccardi, foresaw the effect it would have on immigrants in Italy and wrote a prophetic letter entitled "Foreigners, our brothers", reaffirming the Christian principles of equal dignity and rights for all, whatever the skin colour or cultural and religious background.

During the prayer service in Santa Maria in Trastevere, the names, ages and nationalities of some of the victims of today's perilous journeys were read out, a long litany of young lives cut short by drowning, suffocating or being run over as they hid in the trucks that were smuggling them across borders into Italy, France, Spain or Britain. Names such as four-year-old Favor and two-year-old Lucky, who died of exhaustion and whose bodies were tossed overboard near the Italian island of Lampedusa on 20 April this year. Or Ali, Abdou and Ayoub, who froze to death inside a refrigerator truck near the northern city of Trieste on 14 July 2007. Or 13-year-old Zaher Rezei from Afghanistan, who was killed under the wheels of a truck that had taken him to Venice last January and whose pockets revealed a scrap of paper on which he had scrawled a poem ending with the words: "I have come so far, night and day, on the boat of your love, O God, that either I will learn to love you or I will die a watery death ... I do not know what dream destiny holds in store for me, but promise me God that you will not let this springtime of mine be extinguished."

In a very different context, during his recent visit to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, Pope Benedict gave a profound meditation on the names of the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust, saying: "A person can be robbed of possessions, opportunity or freedom. One can weave an insidious web of lies to convince others that certain groups are undeserving of respect. Yet, try as one might, one can never take away the name of a fellow human being."

Beyond the grim statistics and the political debates, such an annual remembrance of the names and faces of these young victims is an important part of the struggle to change minds and hearts and to make this country a more tolerant and welcoming society.