Vatican Convicts Climate Activists, Orders Them to Pay $30,000 in Damages

Laura Zorzini, who video-recorded the demonstration in the Vatican Museums, was also given a suspended fine of $129.

The three are part of Ultima Generazione (“Last Generation”), an Italian group that encourages nonviolent civil disobedience to “raise the alarm on the climate emergency.”

“The sentence today in Vatican City: 9 months in prison for one gram of glue. An exaggerated sentence that does not want to recognize the dramatic nature of the situation that motivates all our protests,” the group wrote on Twitter after the conviction June 12.

Ultima Generazione is soliciting donations to help Viero and Goffi pay their personal legal fees and the more than $30,000 in damages awarded to Vatican City State.

The climate group is also behind other recent high-profile protests in Italy, including throwing carbon black in Rome’s Trevi Fountain and Four Rivers Fountain in May.

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On May 23, about a dozen members of the group threw mud at Rome’s Senate building while two members put mud on their bare chests to protest what they said was the government’s complicity in disastrous flooding in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy last month.

Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.