Pope to US cemetery at Nettuno (4)

(ANSA) - Vatican City, November 2 - Pope Francis visited the US cemetery in Nettuno south of Rome and then the Ardeatine Caves on Rome's southern outskirts on Thursday, All Souls Day.
    Almost 8,000 US soldiers killed in the Sicily, Salerno and Anzio landings are buried at Nettuno, as well as American Red Cross nurses killed during the Italian campaign.
    The Ardeatine Caves are the site of Rome's worst WWII German atrocity, the 1944 reprisal killings of 335 Italian men and boys after a partisan attack that killed 33 South Tyrolean SS military police in central Rome.
    At Nettuno the pope visited the tombs including an unknown soldier, an Italo-American and a Jew before saying Mass. He was greeted by the cemetery's director Melanie Resto and the mayors of Nettuno and Anzio, respectively Angelo Casto and Luciano Bruschini. At the cemetery Mass, the pontiff railed against the futility of war and cited Pope Benedict XV who vainly tried to stop World War One.
    Francis appealed for the end of all war. "Please Lord, not more war, not more of these pointless slaughters, as Benedict XV would have said. "Better to hope without destruction, thousands and thousands of young people, broken hopes, no more Lord, and we must say this today in this place in a special way for these young people, today when the world is again at war and is preparing to go to war again. "No more Lord, no more, everyone loses with war". At the Ardatine Caves later the pope stood in silent prayer for four minutes and then laid wreath of white roses at some tombs before walking silently alone along the corridors that separate them.
    He was greeted by, among others, Rome Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni.
    There were 75 Jews among the 335 killed in the quarry on March 24, 1944.
    In the Book of Honour of the Ardeatine Caves Shrine the pope wrote: "these are the fruits of war: hatred, death, vendetta...Forgive us, Lord".