ROME  For months, the staid newspaper of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Avvenire, steered largely clear of the major topic of conversation here: the spicy personal life of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

But when readers complained that maybe a Roman Catholic newspaper had a moral duty to denounce divorce, consorting with teenage girls, naked poolside parties and being caught on tape telling a prostitute to wait for him in “Putin’s bed” while he showers, the newspaper’s editor began to weigh in.

“People have understood the unease, the mortification, the suffering that this arrogant neglect of sobriety has caused the Catholic Church,” the editor, Dino Boffo, wrote last month.

On Thursday, Mr. Boffo was out of a job.

Late last week, Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by Mr. Berlusconi’s brother, called Mr. Boffo “a homosexual known to the Italian secret services” and the culprit in a sexual harassment suit. Il Giornale’s attack expanded on Thursday, with another editorial aimed at the Catholic Church itself, mocking not just the “hypocrisy” of sexually active priests with “weak flesh,” but even the “Mitteleuropean” accent of Pope Benedict XVI, a German.