By Our Foreign Staff
Telegraph Company
UK, London
April 21, 2008
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, a Colombian prelate who
helped lead the Vatican's campaign against abortion and insisted condoms do not
prevent transmission of the Aids-causing virus, has died in a Rome hospital,
aged 72.
Lopez Trujillo died of a heart attack on Saturday night at the
Pius XI private clinic, where he had been admitted for tests on March 17, said
Monsignor Jorge Raigosa.
He suffered medical complications after being admitted to
hospital several weeks ago for "grave health problems" and had been in intensive
care.
In March 2007, Lopez Trujillo travelled to Mexico to launch
the Roman Catholic Church's campaign against plans in the predominantly Catholic
country to legalise abortion. Catholic teaching forbids abortion as a grave
sin.
The cardinal inaugurated an international anti-abortion
conference in Mexico City by celebrating Mass in the Basilica of the Virgin of
Guadalupe, the most important Catholic shrine in the Americas.
The following month, the Mexico City assembly passed a measure
legalising abortion in the capital during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Opponents appealed the law and Mexico's Supreme Court is reviewing it.
In 2006, the he said liberal attitudes to abortion in Western
society could one day lead to the Catholic Church facing legal action for its
opposition to the practice.
"I fear that faced with current legislation, speaking in
defence of life, of the rights of the family, is becoming in some societies a
crime against the state, a form of disobedience of the government, a
discrimination against women," he told the Catholic Italian weekly Famiglia
Cristiana.
He also said scientists who experimented on embryonic stem
cells should be viewed in the same light as abortionists and should be barred by
the Church from taking communion.
"Destroying an embryo equals abortion and that excommunication
goes for the woman, the doctors and the scientists who eliminate the embryo," he
said.
Lopez Trujillo made headlines in 2003 for saying that condoms
do not prevent HIV-Aids. He contended that condoms might even help spread
HIV-Aids through a false sense of security.
The cardinal led the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the
Family since 1990.
Priests for Life, an organisation that seeks to end abortion
and euthanasia, hailed Lopez Trujillo as "one of the Church's strongest
advocates for the dignity of the human person and the family."
"He knew and often said that the Church's pro-life stance was
not just a teaching, but a battle," said Rev Frank Pavone, national director of
Priests for Life.
Born in 1935 in Villahermosa, Colombia, Lopez Trujillo moved
with his family when he was a young boy to the capital, Bogota. While a
university student, he decided to attend a seminary, and later received a
philosophy degree from Rome's prestigious Angelicum university.
He was ordained a priest in 1960 and made a bishop in 1971 by
Pope Paul VI. He later headed the Latin American bishops' conference, CELAM. He
was archbishop of Medellin in 1979 when Pope John Paul II attended a CELAM
conference, and in 1983 was elevated to cardinal's rank by the pontiff.
With Lopez Trujillo's death, the number of cardinals eligible
to elect a pontiff drops to 118, Vatican Radio said.
Monsignor Raigosa said Pope Benedict XVI was expected to
celebrate a funeral Mass for the cardinal at the Vatican on Wednesday.
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2008
