It was either a generous act of charity - or an acute attack of conscience.

An anonymous benefactor has left €36,000 (£31,625) stashed in the confessional box of a church near the Vatican in Rome.

The money, in crisp €50 euro notes, was wedged beneath a cushion in the priest’s half of the confessional.

The bank notes were contained in two plastic bags, one blue and the other white.

When the stash was discovered in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie alle Fornaci by a caretaker, there were fears that it could have been a bomb and the police were called.

But when Carabinieri officers opened the packages, they found they were stuffed full of cash.

They are checking video footage from security cameras positioned around the church.

“At the moment we are not excluding any theory,” Lieutenant Salvatore Friano, a Carabinieri officer, told Il Messagero newspaper.

“We’re trying to ascertain whether this was a benefactor who wanted to donate the money to the church, or someone who simply wanted to get rid of dirty money. Perhaps it was their way of paying their dues, both with the law and their own conscience.

“We can’t exclude the fact that this money was acquired illegally, perhaps from a recent robbery.”

Father Giovanni Martire Savina, the parish priest, said that in the past, anonymous donors would leave sums up to 1,000 euros, “but never an amount as large as this.”

The church owes its unusual name to kilns making bricks and terracotta tiles that used to exist in the area – “fornaci” means furnaces in Italian.

It dates back to the 15th century but was extensively redesigned in the 17th century.