In the overnight attacks in Santiago, the capital and largest city where the pope will arrive Monday, the churches were hit with firebombs and then sprayed with accelerant.

“The next bombs will be in your cassock,” read pamphlets found outside one of the churches.

A bomb squad was also deployed to a fourth church, where a barrel of flammable liquid was believed to be inside.

The pamphlets exhorted the cause of the Mapuche indigenous people, who are pushing for a return of ancestral lands and other rights. Francis will celebrate Mass and meet with Mapuches in the southern city of Temuco on Wednesday.

After a security meeting, Ms Bachelet said the Andean nation of 17 million was prepared for the first papal visit since St John Paul II came in 1987.

“I also want to invite you all to experience this visit in a climate of respect, solidarity and happiness,” Ms Bachelet said.

There were no immediate arrests over the firebombings, and authorities downplayed their significance with Interior Ministry official Mahmud Aleuy calling the damage “minor”.

Chilean police did not immediately respond to queries about whether new security measures would be taken after the attacks.

Earlier this week police said 18,000 officers would be deployed during Francis’ visits to Santiago, Temuco and the northern city of Iquique. Police will also have helicopters on hand and monitor events with drones.

It was unclear who might have been behind Friday’s attacks. A small minority of…

One witness to the Scottish Child Abuse inquiry said he had been “extremely well treated” at Smyllum Park in Lanark.

The man, now in his late 60s, said the nuns who ran the home were being unfairly portrayed as “monsters and out-and-out child beaters”.

A second witness, also in his 60s, said previous evidence given to the inquiry was a “gross distortion of the truth”.

Other witnesses have recounted a catalogue of abuse at Smyllum Park, which was run by the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul and closed in the 1980s.

This included beatings, humiliations, cold showers and children being force-fed inedible food.

Friday’s first witness, who cannot be named, arrived at Smyllum in 1957 aged about seven.

He described his time there as “positive”, and dismissed accounts of physical abuse as “absolute rubbish”.

While corporal punishment was used, he said this amounted to a “tug of the ear”, or the use of the belt.

“If it came to someone really misbehaving, and I mean really misbehaving, by language or fighting, then she (one of the nuns) would have had to deal out one or two of the strap,” he said.

Asked about violence inflicted by the nuns, he added: “I didn’t see anything like that. There are lots of lies being told.

“During my time, my window in Smyllum, I never saw any of what is being said about the nuns.”

“The kicking and the slapping never happened,” he said.

The witness described how he had been “shocked and horrified” to read statements from others who…