Terri Schiavo’s parents, grateful for Vatican backing in their failed campaign to keep their brain-damaged daughter alive, briefly met Pope Benedict on Wednesday and gave him a framed picture of her.
Bob and Mary Schindler were in the front row at Benedict’s general audience in St Peter’s Square and he greeted them personally as he passed by.
Schiavo’s mother kissed the pope’s ring and her father shook his hand.
On Tuesday, they met the Vatican’s top justice official Cardinal Renato Martino to thank the Roman Catholic Church for its support.
Schiavo died on March 31 in Florida after a U.S. state court ordered the feeding tube, which sustained her for 15 years, removed at the request of her husband who said it was what she would have wanted.
Pope John Paul II, who died two days after Schiavo, had declared some life-extending treatments a moral duty for Roman Catholics.
Schiavo’s case sparked outrage at the Vatican, which compared the court to an executioner who “arbitrarily brought forward” the date of her death.
At their meeting on Tuesday, Martino commended the Roman Catholic Schindlers’ ongoing efforts to “defend life and the concept of a natural death”.
