An Italian hip hop artist has released a song entitled "Letter to the Pope" urging the Catholic world's new leader to reform the Church, allow people to divorce and put an end to abuses.

Dino Dispenza or "Dydo" for short said just-elected Pope Francis seemed "nice" but the singer said he still wanted to "try and understand what he is going to do", speaking to the Italian news agency ANSA on Thursday.

Dydo starts out his song with a confession: "I admit I've never been a good Christian, I believe in God and not in the Church and the Vatican."

"I ask myself why a priest can't marry, have a son, a family to devote himself to," the behatted Dydo sings in the bleak setting of an abandoned warehouse in the music video of the song available on YouTube.

"It would put an end to all the rapes and you wouldn't have to hush everything up," he says in the song, which was released on February 28 -- the day that Benedict XVI stepped down at the end of a scandal-ridden reign.

Pope Francis is known to be a fan of opera and ponderous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- no word from the Vatican on whether hip hop might appeal.

Dydo goes on to ask the pope to put an end to "the discrimination against people whose only fault is to have been born different" and to "accept separation and not punish a mistake with a life of pain". AFP