Some months ago, an Italian poet’s pressing desire to be taken off a respirator and allowed to die in peace made the international news, including The New York Times, and sparked debate worldwide. The man was Piergiorgio Welby. He had been incapacitated by muscular dystrophy for nine years, and now he was confined to bed, barely moving, kept alive by machines. His campaign to be allowed to die divided Italian society, and even got people talking here. Welby published a book called Let Me Die, and his story monopolised the front pages of Italian newspapers almost every day, as they chronicled the political, ethical and religious issues of the case.

“I find the idea of dying horrible, but what is left to me is no longer a life,” he said in a statement. Yet because his case had become a cause celebre, he was not allowed his wish. Patients in hospitals everywhere are routinely taken off respirators and life support machines with the consent of their next of kin, or their own if they have specified so – but this is done quietly. Piergiorgio Welby, a long-time campaigner for euthanasia, turned the spotlight on his case, and so being taken off the respirator without drawing the attention of priests and politicians was out of the question. He insisted that what he wanted was not euthanasia, because in Italy, as in every other civilised part of the world, people cannot be forced to accept medical treatment unless they are below 18 years of age or another stipulated age of (non)consent. Anyone older than that is free not to accept any treatment at all, and to die or be physically damaged as a result. This is one of the most fundamental of liberties. Lots of people with terminal cancer refuse treatment because they want to spend the last few months of their life without the agonies of radiotherapy or chemotherapy. As they say, it’s a free country. “If it is done privately, there would be a way to accommodate his desire to discontinue life support as burdensome therapy,” Dr Myles Sheehan, a Jesuit priest and physician at the Loyola University Medical Centre in Chicago, and an expert on the ethics of euthanasia, told The New York Times.

But challenge the Catholic Church or the political establishment in Italy, and you’ve had it. You might as well try to do the same in Malta, for all the luck you will have. The Vatican saw Welby’s wish to die as a challenge to its authority on the subject of euthanasia, because he was a euthanasia campaigner. Right-wing politicians, clutching as ever at the skirts of cardinals, followed suit. The result was mayhem. Doctors were threatened with prosecution for murder if they took Welby off the respirator and allowed him to die as he wished. He appealed to the courts. The court ruled that yes, he did have a right to refuse treatment, but paradoxically, the hospital doctors also had the legal obligation to resuscitate him immediately they took him off the machine. To comply with the law, doctors would have to perform a ludicrous and morally appalling pantomime of repeatedly taking him off the respirator and resuscitating him until he died of the strain. And then they would probably be accused of killing him through ill-treatment, in any case. Also, because Italian law makes assisting suicide a crime, any doctor who switched off the life support machine would face criminal prosecution to start with. The legal issues were so confused, with decision-takers sticking to the letter of the law and ignoring its spirit, that the whole thing turned into a circus. While law experts debated the finer legal points, church officials pressed home the point that switching off the respirator would be going against their will.

In extremis, Welby appealed to the Italian president. “This is unbearable torture,” he wrote. “What is natural about a hole in the belly and a pump that fills it with fats and proteins? What is natural about a hole in the windpipe that blows air into the lungs? What is natural about a body kept biologically functional with the help of artificial respirators, artificial feed, artificial hydration, artificial intestinal emptying, of death artificially postponed?”

The Catholic Church opposes the artificial prolongation of life by extraordinary means, and argues against euthanasia, which is classed as murder, and against assisted suicide of the terminally ill, saying that people in this position should be helped to face death with dignity. The controversy turned on the notion that switching off a respirator is tantamount to euthanasia, or assisted suicide. “The problem is to know if we find ourselves truly facing a case of the artificial prolonging of life,” Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the Vatican’s top official on health matters, told the newspaper La Repubblica at the time. It seemed a laughable comment, given the banks of machinery keeping Welby not quite alive, but existing.

When the matter had got completely out of hand, Welby’s physician, Mario Riccio, bit the bullet and did the deed himself. He gathered Welby’s family, sedated him, took him off the respirator, and went out to face the music. And what music it was: banks of journalists, and vein-popping rage from Vatican officials who had been so blatantly defied, and their stance so seriously undermined by a mere doctor and his patient, that something had to be done to redress the balance of power and show them who was boss. Welby was denied a Catholic funeral. The Catholic Church, which gives high-faluting send-offs to murderous Mafia bosses, barred his coffin from its hallowed portals. Fr Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the Roman vicar’s office, said that the decision was taken to send a clear signal to Catholics that Welby’s actions were not acceptable. The general reaction, as expected, was that if everyone whose actions are not acceptable to the Catholic Church is given the same treatment, then there would be no church funerals at all, except for those of saints. That decision left a sour taste because it smacked of small-minded revenge, and undermined the essential Christian message of love and forgiveness. The Catholic Church then issued a statement saying that the decision was taken because “Welby had repeatedly and publicly affirmed his desire to end his own life, which is against Catholic doctrine.”

This was a clever statement, leaving the way open for manoeuvre should the moral ethicists who debate the number of angels dancing on the head of pin decide, after all, that refusing a respirator is morally no different to refusing chemotherapy. He wasn’t denied a funeral because he insisted on being taken off the respirator. He was denied a funeral because “he repeatedly and publicly affirmed his desire to end his own life.” In other words, even if he had been forced to suffer on that respirator until his body packed in, 10 years of torture down the line, he would have been denied a church funeral all the same.

Mario Riccio told journalists categorically that he had neither assisted his patient’s suicide, nor killed him. He had only fulfilled his legal right to refuse treatment. “It’s not exceptional for treatment to be suspended,” he told The New York Times. “It happens every day.” Conservative politicians were having none of that. They demanded his arrest. The scenes and the manner of their discourse had all the tone and dignity of a witch-hunt in the 16th century. The leader of the Christian Democrats, which has strong ties to the Vatican, said confusingly: “This death cannot go unpunished, if only because it was committed in such a violent, scandalous and exploitative way.”

Priests and politicians, believing their authority in these matters to have been challenged and undermined, piled on the pressure for Riccio to be subjected to criminal prosecution, and he was. And that is why I am writing this now – because he has been cleared recently of the preposterous charge of “consensual murder”. The judge in the case argued that by removing Welby’s respirator, Riccio was simply complying with a legitimate request to refuse medical treatment. That was my own argument too at the time. It is completely illogical to argue that refusing life-saving chemotherapy is permissible but refusing life-saving respiration is not. To say that refusing any form of life-saving care is not permissible at all is to create a nightmare world of people being strapped down and subjected to radiotherapy against their will. If you agree with me that this would be appalling, then surely you can also see that it is no different to strapping somebody to a respirator against their will.

Riccio told journalists: “This sentence tells us what we already know – that a person can refuse treatment, even if it is life-saving, and above all, that this right can be delegated to another person.” In other words, if you’re strapped to a respirator and don’t want to be strapped to it any more, you don’t have to remove yourself from the machinery – something that would be impossible if you are paralysed, anyway – but can get the doctors and nurses to do it for you. Riccio faced 15 years in prison, and says he is delighted to be cleared. I am sure there are those who would rather have seen him sent down for life, so that they might press home some more points of Catholic doctrine.

Bishop Rino Fischella, chaplain to the Italian parliament, was having none of this nonsense. He is asking “our Lord to forgive those who killed Welby”. Thank heavens for the separation of powers. Church officials, meanwhile, are still arguing among themselves whether the use of a respirator can be considered “extraordinary care” or not. If a respirator is not extraordinary care, then quite frankly, I don’t know what is. You don’t see many people walking about town strapped to one.