KEY POINTS:
Pope Benedict XVI has touched down in the world's most populous Catholic country in what had been billed as an attempt to shore up the mass of the faithful.
But yesterday, as he spoke to children in Sao Paolo and met Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, his agenda had been swept aside by an abortion controversy stirred up on his journey.
The background to the fuss was the recent vote by Mexico's Parliament to legalise abortion. An Italian reporter on the plane asked whether the Pope agreed that Catholic MPs in Mexico City who voted for legalisation should be considered excommunicated.
He replied: "Yes. The excommunication was not something arbitrary. It is part of the [canon law] code. It is based simply on the principle that the killing of an innocent human child is incompatible with going in Communion with the body of Christ."
The Pope's spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said the Pope was not making new policy in his remarks, and that formal excommunication of offending politicians - a complicated and rare procedure distinct from the doctrine of "self-excommunication" - was not on the cards.
But he endorsed the main drift of the Pope's words. "Legislative action in favour of abortion is incompatible with participation in the Eucharist," he said. Politicians who vote that way, he went on, "exclude themselves from Communion".
When the Pope landed he said the Catholic Church "will not fail to insist on the need to take action to ensure that the family, the basic cell of society, is strengthened". He insisted on the need to promote "respect for human life from the moment of conception until natural death as an integral requirement of human nature".
- Independent
