Abstract: At a conference on 'Freedom and secularism' held in Italy in October 2005, Pope Benedict XVI reminded his audience that fundamental rights are not created by human laws, but are inherent in the very nature of the human person and have their ultimate source in God. Although the Pope had simply re-asserted a long-standing Catholic principle, his statement made newspapers' headlines. The Pope chose to make his re-assertion at a conference organised by the then President of the Italian Senate, which had brought together a number of representatives of the centre-right coalition government in power at the time. Moreover, Benedict XVI's pronouncement fell in the middle of a heated public debate regarding the extent to which it was legitimate for the Italian Catholic Church to intervene in the country's political life. A national referendum on assisted reproductive technologies held a few months earlier had already raised angry voices about the church's open advocacy of the restrictive legislation recently adopted by the government. After the Pope's new declaration, liberal newspapers speculated whether the church was not trying to make sure that 'Italian laws were compatible with divine projects'.1 The issue was not new to a country where the church had exercised a powerful and long-lasting influence over the regulation of issues connected with family life, sexuality and reproduction.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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