Rome, June 13--A law that imposes strict rules on assisted fertility will remain on the books, after the failure on Monday of a hard-fought referendum that rubbed into one of Italy's sorest spots: the relationship between church and state.
(46){{U}}The fight leading up to two days of voting on Sunday and Monday mobilized the nation's political and religious establishments like few others, as the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church including the new pope, Benedict XVI--urged Italians to boycott the referendum.{{/U}}
In the end, the outcome was not even close. Only 26 percent of as many as 50 million eligible Italians voted, meaning that the referendum automatically failed, with the votes uncounted: in its attempt to repeal four crucial sections of a restrictive fertility law passed last year. For the referendum to be valid, 50 percent of eligible voters had to take part.
(47){{U}}The results would seem an immediate victory for the church and for the young papacy(教皇权利) of Benedict, in a Europe where church influence has declined significantly in recent decades.{{/U}} Similar referendums in Italy on divorce and abortion in the 1970's and 80's passed overwhelmingly despite church opposition, and Italians now seem likely to debate whether apathy or a reverse in secularism in the home of the Roman Catholic Church defeated this referendum.
"The results of today mean that Italy is maybe more similar to Texas than to Massachusetts," said Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's culture minister and a friend of Pope Benedict. "Italians want a democracy with values--that values human life--and that is why they rejected this referendum."
For the church, the results seemed especially important since the referendum concerned issues central to church teachings on values. (48){{U}}The fertility law, passed here under church lobbying last year, defines life as beginning at conception and bans most experimentation on human embryos (胚胎).{{/U}}
"I'm struck by the maturity of the Italian people," Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian bishops' conference, told reporters, according to Reuters. Cardinal Ruini, a top Vatican official and close aide to Benedict, regularly urged Italians to abstain from the referendum.
(49) {{U}}Conceding a heavy defeat, the political forces that supported the referendum characterized the results as a blow to the wails between church and state.{{/U}} They warned that the church would next set its sights on Italy's abortion law.
"There is a problem of the climate, of the atmosphere in this country," Emma Bonino, a leader of the Radical Party who spearheaded the fight for legalized abortion in the early 1}980's, told reporters. "It is not secular, and it's very worrying."
(50){{U}}But some experts cautioned against reading too much into the results, noting that Italy is a particular nation, where church and state are entwined like nowhere else; that a battle over abortion would be much more difficult; that a similar fight seemed unlikely to gain ground elsewhere in Europe.{{/U}}