EXC 212 A13 - Political Modernity and theCatholic Church in Italy’s “First Republic”: The Political and Cultural Controversy about the Amendment of the Concordat

Basic data for this project

Description

During the 1950s, a debate arose on the contradiction (the so-called “anomaly”) between the constitutional principle of the freedom of conscience and religion (article 8) and the continuing privilege of the Catholic Church by means of the acceptance of the 1929 Lateran Treaty into the Italian republican constitution (article 7). Starting from the analysis of this debate, the core focus of the project A13 is the historical investigation of the reform debate on the amendment of the concordat between the Italian State and the Vatican in the years from 1948 to 1984. The project’s point of origin is the observation that in the scientific reception of and accounting for the forty-year reform process, most (historical) studies concentrate mainly on the institutional dimension of challenging the concordat or on the parliamentary and diplomatic development of the amendment. Thus, the project A13 focuses increasingly on society’s mesolevel. In addition to the institutional political players, autonomous groups (also Catholic ones) and groups that take a critical stance towards the parties and the Church hierarchies will also be investigated as not only activists such as the Partito Radicale, communists, socialists and anti-clericals appeared as protagonists of the debate, but also large parts of the Catholic democratic public (ACLI, CISL, FUCI and the “groups of dissent”). Their different and alternative interpretations of the system to enforce normative provisions of the Catholic Church, existing until 1984, and their critical stance on the state’s independence of the Vatican will be analysed in the project.