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Politicians and priests were split on Sunday over the Roman Catholic Church's refusal to allow a religious funeral for Piergiorgio Welby, an Italian writer turned euthanasia campaigner.
Welby, 60, ill for many years, died Wednesday after a doctor sedated him and removed him from a respirator. His civil funeral took place on Sunday morning and was due to be followed by a cremation later in the day.
Right wing deputies stood by the church's decision whereas their left wing counterparts generally displayed a more sympathetic attitude.
"If the church had accepted a religious funeral ... its message of protecting life until its natural end, which the pope affirmed today, would not have been credible," said Riccardo Pedrizzi, a deputy of the rightwing National Alliance, according to the ANSA news agency.
"The radical left is anti-Catholic and exploited Welby's death. The funeral would have been hypocrisy," said Lorenzo Cesa, secretary of the centre-right Christian Democrat Union.
The Radical Party, a small but vocal member of the left's ruling coalition, supported Welby's fight for euthanasia with high profile campaigning.
"The Vatican leadership's position against Welby was cruel," said Franco Grillini, secretary of the left wing Olive Tree coalition. "The doors closed to Welby's body by the Church of Rome" were also, he said, "closed to modernity".
The Green Party's environment minister Alfonso Percoraro Scanio said he regretted that "the pity of the church had not prevailed".
"The church that is merciful and inclusive in the face of the suffering and frailty of man is not the one which refused a funeral to Welby," said Umberto Ranieri, deputy with the Left Democrats party, the largest in the ruling coalition.
Several priests also came out against the decision, including Father Antonio Mazzi who called it a "hypocritical gesture" during a mass for the homeless at Milan's central station.
He added that the church had not "respected the pain, the suffering" of Welby and his family.
"Let us leave to God, and to Him alone, the right to judge a suffering man," said Father Vitaliano dalla Salla on the radio station of the Radical Party.
Alessandro Santoro, a priest from Florence, noted that "nobody high up at the Vatican lodged an objection to the religious funeral" of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who died recently.
Cardinal Ersilio Tonini came out in favour of the ban.
"The church is everyone's mother. Unfortunately, in this case, she had to stand firm: there was an exploitation of this man's suffering and his death, a media circus to say 'we are right'," he said on the RAI television channel.
Welby died after decades suffering from muscular dystrophy, a degenerative condition which slowly paralyses the entire body.
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AFP 241841 GMT 12 06
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