After an investigation lasting almost two years, a team of Italian police officers has shut down five websites which have been mixing pornography and religion.

A police spokesman said: "We blocked out these sites because they tied a festival of blasphemy with distasteful sexual images in which they mixed the name of God, and the name of the Madonna, with religious cursing.

"They then went on to show a nun in suggestive clothes [and] other things in poor taste."

Although religious swearing in the country has been decriminalised, publishing or broadcasting sacrilegious material is still an offence.

More worrying for the church is that the sites registered about 12 million hits over the two years they were open, according to police.

The officers were involved in an international operation to catch the website operators because, although they were created in Italy, the internet service providers were based in Washington DC and California.