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Hundreds attend activist's funeral

About 1,000 people, some chanting ``shame, shame, shame,'' attended a funeral in a Rome square on Sunday for Piergiorgio Welby, a paralysed man who was denied a Catholic service because he had asked to die. The lay service for the 60-year-old was held outside the parish hurch where his family had wanted a religious funeral. PHOTO: EPA

Around 1,500 people attended a civil funeral in Rome for Italian right-to-die campaigner Piergiorgio Welby on Sunday as Pope Benedict XVI affirmed the sanctity of human life.

The supporters, gathered at Rome's San Giovanni Bosco square, applauded the arrival of the coffin at 9:30am carrying the remains of Welby, who died on Wednesday after a doctor sedated him and removed him from a respirator. He was later to be cremated.

The funeral of the 60-year-old muscular dystrophy victim came two days after Italy's Roman Catholic Church denied Welby religious rites. The pope, in his pre-Christmas message from nearby Vatican City on Sunday, appeared to respond to the controversy.

"The birth of Christ helps us to be aware of what human life is worth, the value of every human life, from his first moment to his natural decline," Benedict said.

Welby's campaign has sparked a debate on euthanasia in largely Roman Catholic Italy, where aiding it is punishable by up to 15 years in prison, although patients are legally allowed to refuse care.

"I would have liked his funeral to have taken place at the church for his mother. It's a question of tradition," Welby's wife, Mina, told reporters as she attended the funeral with his mother and sister.

Still, Welby's widow said she was glad his painful struggle to die was over.

"I am happy for him, he is free," she said.

"I'll carry on his battle," she added, judging that her husband's eloquent September letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano had mobilized awareness in Italy and overseas.

"Dying frightens me," Welby wrote to Napolitano at the time, "but unfortunately what is left for me is no longer life, it's only a stubborn and senseless struggle to keep biological functions active."

Members of Italy's leftist Radical Party which embraced Welby's high-profile campaign to legalize euthanasia were also present at the ceremony.

"A person's body, for believers, belongs to God, but certainly not to the state or government," party member and External Trade Minister Emma Bonino told the crowd.

Leftist Senator Gavino Angius denounced the church's position as "incomprehensible and lacking in human pity."

"We're in the Christmas season, I don't think Jesus would have appreciated or will appreciate a gesture like that from the Vatican," Angius said in remarks published by the Ansa news agency.

Indeed, several priests came out against the Church's official stance on the funeral, including Father Antonio Mazzi who called it a "hypocritical gesture" with which the church had not "respected the pain, the suffering" of Welby.

Florentine priest Alessandro Santoro noted that "nobody high up at the Vatican lodged an objection to the religious funeral" of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
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