Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

HEALTH

Rome: Woman fined for breaking Italy’s quarantine to walk her turtle

An Italian woman who took her turtle out for a walk has been fined €400 by the Roman police for breaking strict coronavirus confinement rules.

Published: 14 April 2020 15:53 CEST
Rome: Woman fined for breaking Italy's quarantine to walk her turtle
Police enforce Italy's Covid-19 restrictions in Rome. Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

Italians need a justifiable reason to be out on the street in the middle of a pandemic that has officially claimed more than 20,000 lives in the country since February.

Taking your dog out for a walk is viewed as a good enough reason to leave your home. But it seems taking your turtle out for one is not.

READ ALSO:

The Roman police said the 60-year-old woman was “caught outside her home without a justifiable reason” and fined.

“The woman was walking with a turtle,” the police statement said.

Roman police spokesman Nunzio Carbone told AFP that the woman was fined €400 because it was “not a justifiable excuse”.

Carbone said the turtle was “as big as a pizza” but not wearing a leash.


A homeless man and his cat in central Rome last week. Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

Italian authorities reported issuing a record 16,545 fines on Easter Monday — a national holiday in largely Catholic Italy. Another 13,756 fines were issue on Sunday.

Italians have been joking on social media about renting out their dogs to anyone who was going stir crazy and needed a good excuse to go out.

 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

ROME

Vatican updates guidelines on miracles to avoid ‘confusion among the faithful’

The Vatican updated its rules for supernatural events on Friday, such as visions of Christ or the Virgin Mary, including the acknowledgement that overactive imaginations and outright "lying" risked harming the faithful.

Published: 17 May 2024 16:59 CEST
Vatican updates guidelines on miracles to avoid 'confusion among the faithful'

The new norms, published by the Holy See’s powerful Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and approved by Pope Francis, allow for a more “prudent” interpretation of events that generally avoids declaring them outright a supernatural event.

“In certain circumstances not everything is black or white,” Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, who leads the dicastery, said at a press conference.

“Sometimes a possible divine reaction mixes with… human thoughts and fantasies,” Fernandez added.

The history of the Catholic Church is filled with episodes of strange or unexplained phenomena involving religious statues or other objects, whether in Italy or beyond.

The new guidelines come two months after the Church said that a series of widely reported miracles attributed to a statuette of the Virgin Mary – including making a pizza grow in size – were false.

The rules, which represent the first update since 1978, provide more guidance to bishops who until now have been left relatively free to determine the authenticity of such visions on a case-by-case basis.

Underscoring the complexity of the issue, only six cases of such alleged supernatural events have been “officially resolved” by the Vatican since 1950, with one taking “seventy excruciating years”, the document said.

“Today, we have come to the conviction that such complicated situations, which create confusion among the faithful, should always be avoided,” wrote Fernandez in the document.

Argentinian cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez speaks to the press on February 12, 2024. (Photo by Andreas SOLARO / AFP)

The new rules call for more collaboration between the individual dioceses and the Vatican regarding such events. Bishops’ final decisions will be submitted to the dicastery for approval.

That is crucial because “sometimes the discernment may also deal with problems, such as delicts (civil offences), manipulation, damage to the unity of the Church, undue financial gain, and serious doctrinal errors that could cause scandals and undermine the credibility of the Church,” said the document.

They include believers “misled by an event attributed to a divine initiative but is merely the product of someone’s imagination” or those who have an “inclination toward lying”.

In the absence of problems, dioceses will be able to declare a “Nihil Obstat”, indicating there is nothing in the phenomenon contrary to faith and morals.

That falls short of an official declaration of its supernatural authenticity, which is generally to be avoided under the new rules unless the pope authorises it.

SHOW COMMENTS