Figures released by the interior ministry showed that less than 30 percent of Italians voted in the two-day referendum, far short of the 50 percent needed for the result to be binding, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Analysts gave credit to the boycott call spearheaded by the Roman Catholic Church for trouncing the attempt to relax Italy 's stringent fertility and bioethics law.

Only  18.7 percent of Italy 's electorate cast their vote Sunday, June 12, AFP reported.

Italy was deeply divided over the referendum, which asked people to authorize medical research on embryos, scrap a reference to the embryo as a full human being and give people with hereditary diseases access to medically-assisted procreation, currently permitted only to sterile couples.

The referendum also asked whether to abolish current restrictions which only allow couples to create three embryos that must all be implanted at the same time, and without checking whether they carry genetic diseases.

Opponents say the proposed changes go against what the pope has called the "inviolability of human life from conception," while supporters say the current law puts women's health in danger, risks leaving Italy in the dark ages of medical research, and could lead to a re-criminalization of abortion.

"Few vote, referendum drowns," headlined the Corriere della Sera daily Monday.

The Church

Analysts pointed at voter apathy but also at the appeal of Italian cardinals who, backed by newly-elected Pope Benedict XVI, urged predominantly Roman Catholic Italians to abstain on moral grounds.

Bioethics is one of the many problems facing Pope Benedict XVI, who has a reputation as a strict defender of conservative Roman Catholic doctrine.

"The Church exults," wrote Orazio Petrosillo, Vatican expert in Il Messaggero, while Turin's La Stampa daily said "Catholics could return the slap in the face they received by the abortion and divorce law," approved in referendums despite Church opposition in the 1970s.

Although top prelates and the Vatican kept a low profile as the voting continued, Father Gianni Baget Bozzo, a priest linked to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said he was preparing a "Te Deum" hymn of thanksgiving, AFP said.

For the Church, the vote could mean a long-awaited victory after it lost referendums in the 1970s and early 1980s which approved divorce and abortion in the Catholic country, Reuters said.