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ROME, March 29, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The head of the Italian bishops conference told Italian voters last week that the supreme human right is the right to life and that all other political considerations must be subservient to it. Writing on today’s vote for the presidency of the Lazio region, which includes the city of Rome, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco said that the “unfathomable crime of abortion in all its forms, is one of the non-negotiable issues by which Catholics must vote in the upcoming regional election.”

The cardinal said there is a “hierarchy” of values that form the basis of ineradicable political and social principles: the dignity of the human person, defense of life from conception to natural death, religious freedom and freedom of education and the family based on marriage between a man and a woman.

“It is only on this basis that other essential values can be implanted and guaranteed such as the right to work and home, freedom of enterprise for the common good, the welcome to immigrants, and encouragement to them to become law-abiding and integrated; respect for creation, freedom from crime, particularly organized crime,” the cardinal said. 

“It is an indivisible whole property, located on the border of life and solidarity, which is the stable horizon of judgment and commitment in society. What social solidarity, [can be achieved] if you reject or suppress life, especially the weaker?”

Church leadership in Italy is becoming alarmed at the electoral prospects of Emma Bonino, a former member of the European Parliament and current member of the Italian Senate who is a leader of the militantly anti-Christian Italian Radical Party, and who is running for the Lazio region presidency.

Bonino was a primary mover in the legalization of abortion in Italy, and has spent her political career since then promoting more liberalized abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality and anti-clericalism. Despite this, her support among Catholic laity and clergy has grown for her championing of “human rights.”

Addressing the participants to the Permanent Council of Bishops, which will continue until Thursday, March 25 in Rome, Bagnasco spoke of the report recently issued by the Institute for Family Policies showing the “horrifying figures” of nearly three million children not born up to 2008, giving a European abortion rate of one abortion every eleven seconds or twenty million in the last fifteen years.

He decried also the increasing use of “hidden” chemical abortions by means of the Morning After Pill and RU-486.

Read related LSN coverage:

Italian Candidate “Staunchest Enemy” of Christian Principles in Italy: Lobby Group
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/mar/10031904.html

Virulent Pro-Abortion Candidate Widely Supported by Catholics in Rome’s Provincial Election
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10012902.html%5C

Italian Candidate a Threat to Religious Freedom on International Scene: Catholic Lobby Group
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/mar/10032201.html