Chrch sez stop txtn 4 lent. Or, put another way, the Italian Church wants its followers to forswear text messaging, social networking websites and computer games in the run-up to Easter.

While many Italians traditionally give up fatty foods or, in extremis, alcohol, the appeal to go without some of the trappings of the modern world, including Facebook, iPhones and computer games, on Fridays – and on other days if possible – is unprecedented.

It appears to stem partly from Pope Benedict XVI's recent warning to the young not to substitute "virtual friendship" for real human relationships.

The Pontiff warned on his YouTube site in January that “obsessive” use of mobile phones or computers “may isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development".

Expert View

It is not texting the Catholic Church should give up but Luddism. And they should employ a few people who know how to use computers

Ruth Gledhill

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Pope Benedict also has personal experience of the distractions of obsessive texting. President Sarkozy of France, a renowned technophile, came in for withering criticism for checking his mobile for text messages during a personal audience with the Pontiff.

The "stop texting for Lent" campaign began in the dioceses of Modena, Bari and Pesaro but has now spread to other parts of Italy.

The Trento diocese in the Italian Alps said that it was urging young Italians not only to give up texting and computer games but also to avoid throwing chewing gum on the pavement and "egocentrism".

The church authorities at Rivoli near Turin are going one further and asking parishioners to switch off their television sets and drape them with black cloth until Easter.

The Venice patriarchate is also asking people to drink tap water instead of bottled mineral water.

Father Gianni Fazzini of the Venice diocese said that such appeals for "sobriety" were not only in the spirit of Lent but also appropriate at a time of recession.

"If we all renounce something individually, it can have a collective effect," he told La Repubblica. "In changing our consumer habits in response to the economic disaster, we can also fufill our responsibility as Christians to safeguard God's Creation."

The campaign also has a more tangible motive: the trade in columbite-tantalite (coltan), dubbed "Africa's blood metal", a rare mineral which is a crucial element in mobile phones, laptops and videogame consoles, and is mined in Congo, along with diamonds and gold.

Monsignor Benito Cocchi, the Archbishop of Modena, said that renouncing text messages was a way of helping to tackle the roots of a Third World conflict as well as an act of self-denial.

Italians send the second highest number of texts in Europe after Britain, with the average mobile phone user sending at least 50 a month.

Francesco Panigadi, of the Catholic Missionary Centre at Modena, said that profits from the coltan trade had fuelled one of the worst conflicts in modern African history. "About 80 per cent of coltan comes from Kiwu, the region of Congo where a civil war has cost four million lives in ten years," he said.

The industrialised world's trade in coltan had financed "war and lawlessness", not only in eastern Congo but also in Rwanda and Uganda, becoming a major source of revenue for rival armed groups, Mr Panigadi added.

However, Bruno Dallapiccola, professor of genetics at Rome University, said that his classes were full of students who were unlikely to heed the appeal. "Very few young people listen to Church leaders, and even fewer will stop sending SMS messages. Do you really think people will stop contacting each other because the bishop says so?"

Doubts were also expressed inside the Vatican, with Gian Maria Vian, editor of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, noting that text messages were "by their nature a neutral tool, neither good nor bad in themselves. It depends how they are used. If text messages are a proper way of communicating I don't see why we should deprive ourselves of them on Good Friday or any other day."

Gianni Gennari, a theologian who writes for Avvenire, the paper of the Italian bishops, described the idea as "ridiculous”, adding: “You might as well launch a campaign to turn off the electric light and stay in the dark. This wave of bizarre proposals risks making the whole idea of Lent banal. Priests would do better to ask the faithful to forego a cup of coffee and donate the money saved to the poor."