Emma Bonino, who died at 78, spent nearly half a century insisting that democratic societies must answer their deepest questions about family, conscience, and law through the voices of citizens rather than ecclesiastical authority. Working within Italian politics across multiple roles and decades, she helped transform what had once seemed untouchable — the Catholic Church's near-absolute influence over legislation — into contested, and ultimately changed, terrain. Her life traced the arc of modern Europe's long negotiation between inherited religious order and secular self-determination, and h