Pope won't try to overturn abortion laws, vicar says

ROME — The pope's vicar for Rome said Tuesday that the Roman Catholic Church will not mount a futile campaign to overturn laws permitting abortion, despite criticism in the book by Pope Benedict XVI that Europe has failed to protect its "youngest and weakest."

Benedict also explores faith and what it means to be Christian in "The Europe of Benedict: In the crisis of cultures," which was released Tuesday.

The book was written when Benedict was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and that is the name on the book's cover. Ratzinger last updated it on April 1 — a day before Pope John Paul II died and 18 days before Ratzinger was elected the 265th leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Yet the book covers many of the themes Benedict has already focused on in his two months in office, issues that are expected to be priorities of his pontificate: the role of Christianity in Europe and the need to respect life from conception to its natural death.

Looking at current culture in Europe, the pope acknowledges it would be easy to resign oneself to the fact that abortion is a legal right in much of the continent. But he concludes that there is no such thing as a "little homicide" and that when man loses the respect for life, he inevitably ends up "losing his own identity."

He criticizes parents who think their rights to freedom trump the rights of the unborn child, saying: "They become blind to the right to life of another, of the youngest and weakest who don't have a voice."

"Accepting that the rights of the weakest can be violated means that you accept also that the right of force prevails over the force of rights," he writes.

Yet Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope's vicar for Rome, told a panel discussion at the book launch that the Catholic Church wasn't about to launch a campaign to overturn laws permitting abortion, since it wouldn't succeed. The issue has been raised in Italy following the success of a Vatican-backed campaign to doom a referendum that would have relaxed Italy's strict controls on assisted fertility.

"The church can't but take into consideration the historic circumstances in which it moves," Ruini said. "Concerning abortion legislation, beyond the clear moral judgment of the church, it cannot set aside the foreseeable results that an action like this could have. This is fairly obvious and realistic."

Benedict takes as a starting point in his book the decision of European Union leaders to exclude a reference to Europe's Christian roots from the preamble of the proposed EU constitution, whose future remains uncertain following its rejection by French and Dutch voters in recent referendums.

The Vatican had campaigned to have the reference included in the charter, part of its attempts to stem what it sees as a continent of increasingly empty churches that is often hostile to religion.

"Europe has developed a culture which, in a way never before known to humanity, excludes God from public conscience," Benedict writes.

Benedict writes that Europe needs more people like St. Benedict of Norcia, the 5th and 6th century monk who is a patron saint of Europe and whose name is referred to in the book's title. The Benedictine order that followed his teachings became the main guardian of learning and literature in Western Europe during the dark centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

Officials at the Cantagalli publishing house said there were no immediate plans to translate Benedict's book from Italian into other languages.

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