Fighting broke out outside a church in Rome yesterday after the Pope beatified 498 priests and nuns killed in the Spanish Civil War.

Members of the congregation attacked left-wing protesters carrying a banner that read: “Those who have killed, tortured and exploited cannot be beatified.”

Around 30 people tore the banner to pieces along with a large reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, the depiction of the bombing of a Basque town carried out by Franco’s side.

Italian police arrested seven people and impounded a van that protesters had used to film the fighting.

In a speech to 30,000 – mainly Spanish – pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, Pope Benedict XVI paid tribute to the “martyrs” of the 1936-39 war and put them on the path to sainthood. “Their words and gestures of forgiveness towards their persecutors should enable us to work towards reconciliation and peaceful coexistence,” he said.

The Roman Catholic Church largely supported Franco during the war and its aftermath. Critics said it was again choosing sides by honouring victims on only one side and that the Pope should have recognised the Church’s role in supporting a fascist dictator who killed untold thousands and overthrew a democratically elected government.

Spain’s Association for Historical Memory, which is exhuming mass graves of those killed on the Republican side to give them a proper burial: said: “As long as the Church accepts only its role as victim and not executioner, it will simply be contributing to . . . the partisan use of the past.”

The country’s Socialist Government has clashed repeatedly with the Roman Catholic Church. The Prime Minister, José Luis RodrÍguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was executed by Franco’s forces, has caused howls of protest from conservatives after introducing a law aimed at redressing the injustices suffered by victims of the regime. Among other measures, the law orders the removal of any symbols of the dictatorship, which arguably include the shrines in many Spanish churches to the dead on Franco’s side. Republican victims still lie in dozens of unmarked mass graves around the country.

On this occasion, however, the Government and the Vatican have striven to avoid confrontation. The Government sent its Foreign Minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, to lead the Spanish delegation at the ceremony.

War to the death

— About 500,000, mostly civilians, died during the three-year war

— Bands of Communist and Anarchist irregulars on the Republican side burnt churches and killed thousands of priests and nuns. Falangist death squads executed tens of thousands of Spaniards suspected of harbouring leftist sympathies

— The conflict was seen as a dress rehearsal for the Second World War, with Nazi Germany supporting Franco and the Soviet Union backing the Republic

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