Emma Bonino, Who Fought the Vatican and Won, Dies at 78

Emma Bonino, the radical Italian politician who led campaigns to legalise divorce and abortion against the objections of the Vatican, has died aged 78, the Guardian reported on Friday. The New York Times, in its own obituary, said that in nearly five decades in politics she wielded outsize influence on Italian discourse and helped erode the political sway of the Catholic Church.

The Guardian's account describes a militant feminist who began in the Radical Party and went on to become foreign minister, an unusual trajectory for a politician whose early campaigns were fought outside the parliamentary mainstream. Both papers place her at the centre of the battles that separated the Italian state from the Church's moral authority — divorce, abortion, and later euthanasia and civil unions.

The obituaries are written from outside Italy, and they read the country through the causes Bonino won. That is the frame foreign readers will take from her death: a Catholic nation that nonetheless voted, repeatedly, against the Vatican's instruction.

The New York Times obituary emphasises the scale of what it calls her outsize influence, noting that she helped erode the political sway of the Church over a period of decades. The Guardian's version leads with the confrontations themselves — the campaigns, the referendums, the Vatican opposition — and with the fact that she later held the foreign ministry. The two accounts agree on the essentials and differ in emphasis: one on influence, the other on conflict.

Bonino's career is a reminder of how contested the Italian settlement on these questions has been. Divorce and abortion were legalised only after bitter public fights, and the Church remained a recurring presence in the world's coverage of Italy long afterwards. That the same politician who fought those battles could end up representing the country abroad is a fact foreign correspondents have long found worth remarking on.

For readers in Tuscany, the resonance is less institutional than civic. This is a region whose cities have long been read abroad as the Catholic and Renaissance heartland, and whose politics have often run in a different direction from the Vatican's. Bonino's death will be reported in the foreign press as the passing of a figure who forced the country to decide what kind of state it wanted to be.

The Guardian notes the reaction to her death in Italy, including tributes from political figures. Neither obituary, as published, offers a full account of her ministerial record; both return to the campaigns that made her name. What the foreign coverage does not do is treat her as a curiosity. It treats her as consequential.