Pro-life advocate and Pontifical Council for the Family head, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo has died at a Rome hospital after a short illness. The International Herald Tribune reports that Colombian born Cardinal Trujillo Lopez helped lead the Vatican's campaign against abortion and insisted condoms do not prevent transmission of the AIDS-causing virus.
Aged 72, Cardinal Lopez Trujillo died Saturday night at the Pius XI private clinic, where he had been admitted for tests on March 17, a spokesman said.
He died after suffering cardiac arrest following various medical complications over several weeks that had put the cardinal in intensive care at times, the spokesman said, declining to elaborate.
Vatican Radio said the cardinal had been hospitalized for "grave health problems."In March 2007, Lopez Trujillo traveled to Mexico to launch the Roman Catholic Church's aggressive campaign against plans in the predominantly Catholic country to legalise abortion.
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.
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 headed the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family since 1990.
"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," Cardinal Lopez Trujillo told the Catholic Italian weekly Famiglia Cristiana according to Reuters.
He also said scientists who experiment on embryonic stem cells should be viewed in the same light as abortionists and should be barred by the Church from taking Communion.
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.
Lopez Trujillo 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.
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