The Pontifical Academy for Life has said its president is against assisted suicide but thinks it is possible to have a “legal initiative” that would allow it to be decriminalised in Italy under “specific and particular conditions.”

The statement was issued following an outcry over a speech in which Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia defended legalising medically assisted suicide in Italy. The archbishop called it a “feasible” approach to the issue in Italian society, despite the Catholic Church’s clear teachings against it.

“Personally, I would not practice suicide assistance, but I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions we find ourselves in,” Paglia said in a speech on April 19 during the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.

It was the archbishop’s opinion that a “legal mediation” but “certainly not a moral one” is possible in order to keep assisted suicide a crime in some cases, while decriminalising it in other cases.