The Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano criticized Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi Sunday for telling an anti-Semitic joke at his 74th birthday party last week. The poor taste joke was recorded on video and posted on the website of Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Saturday. The newspaper described the joke as "deplorable", adding that it "offended the sentiment of believers and the sacred memory of six million Holocaust victims".
Berlusconi told supporters outside his home: "A Jew hides a fellow Jew in his basement at the time of the concentration camps and charges him 3,000 euro a day". "The Jew paid up because he had the money, but do you think he should tell him that Hitler has died and the war is over?"
The prime minister was unrepentant Sunday and said the joke was "just a laugh" "made in private, not offensive and not a sin."