"SMALL MURDERS"

The Pope has a new book being released.

While all the material was previously published in other forms, the importance the Pope attaches to it was underscored by the fact that the compilation was being presented later on Tuesday by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, his vicar for Rome, and Marcello Pera, speaker of the Italian Senate.

It was also being published less than two weeks after Italy's Roman Catholic Church won a significant victory in a referendum that blocked attempts to dismantle Italy's strict law on assisted fertility and embryo research.

In one section of the book, the Pope asks rhetorically why the Church should not accept that abortion is legal in many countries.

"Why don't we resign ourselves to the fact that we lost that battle and dedicate our energies instead to projects where we can find greater social consensus?" he writes.

Because this, he says, would be a superficial and hypocritical solution.

"Recognizing the sacred nature of human life and its inviolability without any exceptions is not a small problem or something that can be considered part of the pluralism of opinions in modern society," he writes.

"There is no such thing as 'small murders'. Respect for every single life is an essential condition for anything worthy of being called social life."