The Vatican voiced outrage today over a landmark court decision to allow a comatose Italian woman to be removed from life support.

Monsignor Rino Fisichella, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, said the Milan Court of Appeal judgement on Eluana Englaro, who has been in an irreversible coma for 16 years, amounted to “an act of euthanasia”.

Ms Englaro is kept alive by a feeding tube. Her father Beppino Englaro has waged a legal battle since 1999 to let her die.

“This is a victory for legal rights, at long last the end of the worst nighmare that any human being can experience,” Mr Englaro said. “The judges made a courageous decision. Now, at last, we can set Eluana free.”

Eluana’s happy suntanned face, smiling at the camera on skiing holidays or by the seaside in photographs taken before the a car crash in 1992 when she was only 20, has been familiar to all Italians.

Technically, her father as officially appointed guardian, in agreement with Eluana’s “Special curator,” lawyer Franca Alessi, could suspend treatment immediately. However, legal sources suggest that they may be wise to wait 60 days, the limit within which Italy’s Court of Cassation, or supreme court, could theoretically reverse the decision.

But the supreme court has already ruled in favour of suspending treatment, and merely returned it to the Court of Appeal to establish with absolute certainty that Eluana’s coma is irreversible, so it is highly unlikely that it will intervene again.

The Court of Appeal said that its decision was “inevitable given the extraordinary duration of a state of permanent vegetation,” and having established her “vision of life, irreconcilable with the total and irreversible loss of her mental faculties”.

In previous stages of the legal battle friends of Eluana had testified that she would have certainly preferred to die than linger in a coma. They declared that after she had visited a friend who was completely paralysed in a motorcycle accident and could only communicate by blinking, she went into a church and lit a candle, praying that he might die.

Mr Englaro’s legal battle began in 1999, when a Milan court rejected his demand to suspend feeding Eluana. He appealed, but in 2002 Italy’s supreme court also ruled against him.

By this time Eluana’s case was receiving a great deal of media exposure. In the years that followed, Italy’s laws regarding ethical issues of this kind were reviewed, and a legal distinction made between euthanasia, in which active steps are taken to cause a patient’s death, and the suspension of therapy keeping the patient alive.

Under the new legislation, Mr Englaro began all over again. That led to the supreme court referring the case back to the Milan Court of Appeal in October last year.

Reaction from the Catholic camp was swift. The Bioethics Committee of Rome’s Catholic university hospital, which is controlled by the Vatican and reflects Vatican thinking, issued a statement declaring that “The interruption of food and drink will result in a slow death for Eluana Englaro, guilty only of being still alive. We must underline the gravity of this decision. It places in the hands of the guardian a power of life and death, undermining the principle that one must look after patients who are unable to think for themselves.”

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