Emma Bonino has died aged 78. May God have mercy on her soul. She was one of the most consequential figures in modern Italian politics, and Catholics should be honest about what that legacy means. She devoted much of her public life to causes fundamentally opposed to Catholic moral teaching, most notably the legalisation and promotion of abortion. She became a principal architect of Italy’s transformation from an overwhelmingly Catholic culture into a far more secular one.
That makes Pope Francis’s repeated warmth towards her, including his extraordinary description of Bonino as one of Italy’s “forgotten greats”, all the more difficult to understand.