Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, raised eyebrows yesterday by publicly demanding that divorced Roman Catholics like himself should be allowed to take Communion.

Attending a mass to inaugurate a new belltower at the parish church at Porto Rotondo in Sardinia, where he has a luxury villa, Mr Berlusconi asked Monsignor Sebastiano Sanguinetti, the local bishop, to "do everything you can to change the rules"so that he could receive the Eucharist.

Bishop Sanguinetti responded drily that Mr Berlusconi had just met Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican and should "ask those more highly placed than me". He later observed that according to Church doctrine marriage was "indissoluble".

He said exceptions were sometimes made, and if the Prime Minister had broached the subject in private in the sacristy before mass "we could have talked about it". But he could not "create a scandal in front of everybody" by discussing the issue in public.

Mr Berlusconi divorced Carla Elvira Dall'Oglio, his first wife, in 1985 and married the actress Veronica Lario five years later.

After the service at Porto Rotondo Mr Berlusconi, wearing a jaunty Panama hat, defended a controverisal draft decree freezing thousands of trials, including the trial in Milan in which he is accused of giving David Mills, his former tax lawyer and the estranged husband of Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister, a 600,000 dollar bribe to give "misleading testimony" in a 1990s corruption trial. Both men deny the charges.

The Higher Council of the Magistracy (CSM) is expected today Monday to declare that the law, under which court cases involving serious offences punishable by more than 10 years in prison would get priority treatment, is unconstitutional. Other cases would be suspended for a year.

The decree, dubbed a "Salva Premier" (Save the Prime Minister) law by the centre Left opposition, has been passed by the Senate but not yet by the Lower House, which will debate it this week. At the EU summit in Brussels last Friday Mr Berlusconi attacked Italy's magistrates and judges as left wing "subversives", saying they were trying to undermine him for political reasons even though he had been democratically elected by a large majority in April.

He insisted he would not avail himself of the law suspending trials. ''There will be no stop to my trial. The 'premier-saving' measure does not exist. I am outraged by this and I'll tell my lawyers that I don't want to benefit from the measure because I want to distance myself from any suspicion,. This is a "Save Everyone" ' measure,'' he said, adding that it was intended to speed up Italy's notoriously slow and inefficient justice system.

Nicoletta Gandus, the judge hearing the Mills-Berlusconi case, said the trial would go ahead despite a demand by lawyers for Mr Berlusconi that she be removed for "publicly taking positions violently opposed" to him. Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, part of the Berlusconi coalition, said Mr Berlusconi was "afraid he will go to jail".

Mr Berlusconi also intends to table legislation giving judicial immunity to the five most senior figures in the Italian state, including himself. A law to that effect was passed in 2003 during his last term in office but overturned by the Constitutional Court.

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