Retired Italian Bishop Bassano Staffieri has called on parents to stop giving their children "ridiculous" names and to go back to traditional saints' names. Bishop Staffieri said that of the 500 girls born in the city of La Spezia this year, "not one was registered or baptised with the name Maria".
He added, "A name is not just a sound, it has a profound meaning."
Mothers and fathers "should return to using a name like Maria, which is inspired by the Virgin Mary," instead of opting for "exotic or strange names of which their children will later be ashamed," the bishop said. There were signs that parents were reverting to traditional names for boys, "but this is still not the case with baby girls, alas."
He said the reason was not so much that Italian families were abandoning the Catholic faith but rather that they did not give enough thought to baptismal names. "The problem is they do not think about what they are doing."
The AS Roma football star Francesco Totti and his wife Ilary have been criticised for calling their baby daughter Chanel, although their son, now three, is called Christian.
Last month the Court of Cassation Italy's highest appeal Court banned a couple from naming their son Friday - Venerdi - because the name "could expose the boy to ridicule."
The court said the name was derived from the manservant in Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, and was therefore associated with "subservience and inferiority". The judges ordered the boy to be renamed Gregorio, after the saint's day on which he was born.
The boy's parents said they would continue privately to call the boy Friday, which was a "nice" name, and threatened to call their next child Mercoledi.
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(Source: CTHN)