Schiavo a symbol for protesters' many causes

For two weeks the prayerful and the devout, the angry and the profane held vigil on a grassy swale in front of the tree-shaded hospice where Terri Schiavo died on Thursday.

They called out for the Governor, the President, the lawmakers and God himself to intervene and prevent what they called the murder of an innocent woman.

In the blazing Florida sun and the drizzling rain, some read aloud from the Bible and knelt quietly on the grass for daily afternoon mass, singing hymns accompanied by soft chords strummed by a Christian rock guitarist.

Some took turns slowly drumming on a plastic bucket labelled "Terri's heartbeat" as Ms Schiavo slowly declined after her feeding tube was removed on March 18 on a court order.

Others railed against what they called activist judges and a government they saw as ignoring their concerns.

"You're going to hell!" shouted Jerry Layne, a street preacher from Tennessee who wore an American flag necktie and denounced abortion, whiskey and "sodomite fags."

One woman wore a Statue of Liberty headdress and carried a giant foam spoon with the slogan, "Feed Terri." A man in a giant orange squiggly necktie tossed balls in the air and said he was "juggling for Jesus."

Most came to show support for prolonging Ms Schiavo's life, drawn by the spotlight of television cameras and the convergence of the nation's conscience.

Fifty-two people, six of them children, were arrested on trespass charges in mostly peaceful efforts to enter the hospice grounds with symbolic offerings of food and water for Ms Schiavo. One man crashed through the bushes and sprinted for the hospice door, surrendering only when police used a stun gun on him.

Ms Schiavo died under police guard. The Woodside Hospice where she died, the circuit and federal courts that refused to order her feeding tube restored, the city of Pinellas Park and its police were inundated with angry phone calls and e-mails from people who felt they should have done something to stop her death. Police logged several bomb threats and over 900 phone calls.

"The majority of them have been very hostile, expressing their opposition to our involvement," said Pinellas Park Police Captain Sanfield Forseth. "We still have a threat to the hospice."

Most of the demonstrators, who came from all around the nation, had never met Ms Schiavo but said they felt a kinship with her and supported efforts to prolong her life.

Some outside the hospice seemed to see her as a symbol for whatever cause they came to espouse. They likened her to Nazi holocaust victims, aborted fetuses and those imprisoned in Cuba by Fidel Castro's government.

The crowd swelled to several hundred on Easter Sunday and dwindled to a hardy few late at night. When a Franciscan friar announced on Thursday morning that Ms Schiavo had died, the few dozen demonstrators camped on the lawn sobbed, prayed and scattered flowers as a trumpet player blared out "A Mighty Fortress is Our God".

"I don't know if anything can stop this evil," said Mary Ann McGuire of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who sat weeping with her 16-month-old son on her lap and said she feared Ms Schiavo's death would open the way for widespread euthanasia. "This can only get worse."

One man took up a black magic marker and scribbled out a new protest sign on a square of cardboard. "The battle was lost but the war is not over," he wrote.

Her death a 'violation of sacred life' - Vatican

The Vatican said the death of the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in Florida had been a "violation of the sacred nature of life", and hoped it would lead to legal changes.

"The circumstances of the death of Mrs Terri Schiavo have rightly shocked consciences. A life has been interrupted," chief spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in the Vatican's first official comment on Ms Schiavo's death.

Ms Schiavo, ruled to have been in a "persistent vegetative state" since 1990, had died earlier on Thursday, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed on the order of a US state court.

"A death was arbitrarily brought forward ... there can be no exceptions to the principle of the sacred nature of life from the moment of conception until its natural end," Dr Navarro-Valls's statement said.

"Besides being a principle of Christian ethics, this is also a principle of human civilisation."

Ms Schiavo had been in constant care since her heart briefly stopped in 1990, depriving her brain of oxygen.

Dr Navarro-Valls's statement said the Vatican hoped the case, which transfixed the public in the United States and around the world, would lead to legal changes.

"One hopes that this dramatic experience will lead to public opinion maturing to a greater understanding of human dignity, and lead to greater protection of life, including at the legal level," it said.

The Vatican repeatedly denounced the court orders in the Schiavo case. The Vatican newspaper called the courts involved in the decisions "executioners".