Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, who died on April 19 aged 72, was the conservative president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and one of the most outspoken and controversial figures in the Catholic Church.For many liberal Catholics Trujillo's uncompromising stance on sexual ethics was an embarrassment.
"When they label Pope Benedict as Cardinal Rottweiler, his critics miss his subtlety and do him a disservice," one unnamed theologian remarked recently.
"It is López Trujillo who is the real Rottweiler at the Vatican."
Yet even though Trujillo's uncompromising language served to highlight divisions between the Church's conservative and liberal wings, at the same time he won respect for the strength and clarity of his convictions.
In 2003 Trujillo stirred controversy when, in a BBC documentary, he compared the use of condoms to prevent the spread of Aids to "playing Russian roulette", since the virus that causes the disease, HIV, could "easily pass through".
This prompted ridicule from scientists at the World Health Organisation, who pointed out that when condoms failed it was usually because they had been misused.
Trujillo's opposition to the use of condoms within marriage where one partner is infected was challenged by, among others, the Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who argued that if someone with HIV had unprotected sex they would be breaking the Sixth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill.
Trujillo defined homosexuality (in a Lexicon On Ambiguous and Colloquial Terms About Family Life and Ethical Questions, published in 2003) as an "unresolved psychological conflict".
When, in 2004, the Spanish parliament legislated to allow same-sex marriage he accused it of "dismantling the family, brick by brick", and called on civil officials to refuse to perform such ceremonies even if it meant losing their jobs.
In 2006 Trujillo argued that scientists involved in medical research with stem cells should be excommunicated (on the ground that the creation of stem cells involved abortion).
As a close confidant of Pope John Paul II, Trujillo was sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to the pontiff; but his intemperate language and the controversy that always followed in his wake meant that he was never really papabile.
After the election of Pope Benedict XVI, Trujillo reportedly hoped to inherit the Pope's old job as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. There was relief among many Catholics when the Pope appointed the more emollient American archbishop William Levada.
Alfonso López Trujillo was born on November 8 1935 at Villahermosa, Colombia, and raised in Bogota, where he was educated at the university and the seminary.
He was ordained in 1960 and, after studying at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome for two years, began his ministry teaching Philosophy.
In the late 1960s he emerged as an implacable opponent of the new "liberation theology" that was being promoted by radical clergy in Latin America, and he caught the eye of influential figures at the Vatican concerned at the implications of the "option for the poor" that the bishops had adopted at a gathering in Medellin in 1968.
In 1971, aged only 36, he was appointed auxiliary bishop in Bogota, and two years later he became secretary-general of Celam, the Latin American bishops' conference, with an unofficial brief to work to overturn the decisions taken at Medellin.
In 1975 he published Liberation or Revolution, in which he accused liberation theologians of practising a "clericalism of Savonarola" which started with good intentions but would end in terror "comparable to the manner in which an octopus imprisons its victim with its tentacles softly and flexibly and finally in a vicelike grip".
In a draft working paper for the 1979 Puebla meeting of Celam he argued that the Latin American military regimes "came into existence as a response to social and economic chaos", observing: "Faced with tensions and disorders, an appeal to force is inevitable."
When it came to the Puebla meeting, however, Trujillo's drafts were set aside by Celam's then president, the Brazilian Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider.
But Trujillo, who was appointed Archbishop of Medellin that year, assumed the presidency of Celam and set about a purge of Left-wingers. In 1985 he was behind the "Andes Statement", which denounced liberation theology as "a fundamental danger for the faith of the people of God".
Trujillo first met the future Pope John Paul II, then Cardinal Wojtyla, in Rome in 1978, when they were caught in a sudden shower and found shelter under the same umbrella.
Trujillo had come to Rome hoping to persuade Pope John Paul I to call a world conference on the family. Later the same year the new Pope sent Trujillo to a new department of the family. He entered the College of Cardinals in 1983, at 48, and became president of his new department in 1990.
Among other things, Trujillo used his influence at the Vatican to block the canonisation of Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was gunned down at his altar in 1980 during the country's civil war.
When Pope Benedict recently indicated his approval for the process of canonisation to proceed, it was interpreted in some quarters as a sign that Trujillo's influence had begun to wane.
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