Pope book says Church can never accept abortion

Pope Benedict, in his first book published since his election, says the Catholic Church can never accept laws allowing abortion because there is no such thing as "small murders".

The Europe of Benedict - In the Crisis of Cultures, is a compilation of three major addresses he gave between 1992 and 2005, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and headed the Vatican department that safeguards doctrinal orthodoxy.

The last was delivered on April 1, a day before the death of Pope John Paul and three weeks before Pope Benedict's election.

While all the material was previously published in other forms, the importance the Pope attaches to it was underscored by the fact that the compilation was presented later yesterday by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, his vicar for Rome, and Marcello Pera, speaker of the Italian Senate.

It was also being published less than two weeks after Italy's Roman Catholic Church won a significant victory in a referendum that blocked attempts to dismantle Italy's strict law on assisted fertility and embryo research. In one section of the book, the Pope asks rhetorically why the Church should not accept that abortion is legal in many countries.

"Why don't we resign ourselves to the fact that we lost that battle and dedicate our energies instead to projects where we can find greater social consensus?" he writes.

Because this, he says, would be a superficial and hypocritical solution.

"Recognising the sacred nature of human life and its inviolability without any exceptions is not a small problem or something that can be considered part of the pluralism of opinions in modern society," he writes.

"There is no such thing as 'small murders'. Respect for every single life is an essential condition for anything worthy of being called social life."

Some Italian politicians fear that the country's powerful Catholic Church will try to make capital of its victory in this month's fertility referendum and eventually try to overturn the country's abortion law.

The book, about 150 pages in Italian, takes its title from St Benedict, the fifth and sixth century monk who founded the Benedictine order which guarded European culture in the Middle Ages.

In other sections of the book, the Pope criticises a decision to exclude a reference to Europe's Christian roots in the EU Constitution.