St. Peter's Basilica Cleansed In Ritual After Man's Suicide

VATICAN CITY - Sprinkling holy water toward the marble walls, a Vatican priest symbolically cleansed St. Peter's Basilica after the suicide there of a distraught Italian pensioner.

The man, identified as 64-year-old Benedetto Minnini of the Italian port city of Bari, shot himself in the mouth Thursday afternoon while the basilica was crowded with tourists.

A woman videotaping inside happened to catch the suicide on tape and apparently was the first to alert authorities in the vast church.

On Friday, the Rev. Giovanni Ferrotti, Vatican parish priest, performed a purification rite under canon law, casting holy water toward all sides of the basilica from the nave where the man killed himself.

"We entrust to the mercy of God the spirit of our brother," Ferrotti said.

The archbishop of St. Peter's, Cardinal Virgilio Noe, determined a fuller reconsecration ceremony was unnecessary because the act was neither a deliberate profanation of the church nor a sacrilegious act in itself, although suicide is a grave sin under church law.

There was no explanation for why the man killed himself; a message on his family's answering machine in Bari said they themselves were trying to understand why.

Italian media called it the first recorded suicide within the

basilica.