THE 'RELIGIONS' OF ITALY

...This immigration has been a major source of religious dislocation given the fact that in 1950 over half the parishes in Italy were in areas that had less than a thousand people in them...

...the liturgy of the demonstration and the rally...

...the legitimation concretized by the ever present crucifix found in classroom, courtroom and public office throughout the country...

...There is, then, a general tendency to view Italy as having two monolithic forces competing for absolute control over the Italian spirit...

...396-468 were quite perceptive), there is still no widespread consensus as to whether the referendum was a grassroots rejection of the pretensions of the Christian Democratic party alone or whether the Italian mentality has been dramatically secularized in these more recent years...

...its conviction that Vatican II should be seen only as a cosmetic job on the unchanging face of Sancta Mater Ecclesia...

...My own feeling is, after having been in Italy for three years since 1970, that religiously speaking, one should take to heart the dictum of Heraclitus all things are in flux...

...For the people of the Deep South in Italy, this religion is, to use the words of Bellah, "real" religion as opposed to the "legal" religion embodied in the teachings of the priests and the bishops...

...For that reason it is interesting to muse on a paper written a few years ago by Robert Bellah (as yet, as far as I can determine, unpublished in this country) on "The Five Religions of Modern Italy...

...THE RELIGIONS' OF ITALY LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM like the Italian Left, the Church is far from being a monolith I think it was the Harvard student travel guide to Europe that waspishly (pun intended) remarked that after a week in Italy one was gagging on pasta and cathedrals...

...This is crucial since Italy is now gearing up for a massive fight both at the governmental and popular level over the question of liberalized laws about abortion...

...still the passion with which the newspapers and journals in Italy follow their fortunes reflect not only a desire for scandal but also a sympathy (even in some of the more centrist press) to the critique that they make of Italian Catholicism...

...yet still a religion Croce said...

...According to Bellah, the fifth religion of Italy is what Croce called "activism" but what we, unrestrained by a hostile regime as was Croce, more commonly call fascism...

...its close ties with the rightist elements of the Christian Democratic Party...

...Gramsci's criticism seems on target since in the practical order, liberalism in the Crocean sense exerts little appeal today in Italy and its few savants are identified with a miniscule Liberal Party...

...which carries on the tradition of the clenched fist, the black shirt and delirious dreams of Italy's glorious past...

...Giuliano della Pergola (in Testimonianze #150) has disentangled at least four diverse currents in the contemporary Italian Church...

...that number dropped to 40 percent in 1960...

...It had a defect, and it was the Marxist Antonio Gramsci who pinpointed it Liberalism was a religion only for the elite and Croce himself, somewhat patronizingly, felt that Catholicism would remain the religion of the masses...

...They probably will remain somewhat emarginated though, since they are alienated from bourgeous sensibilities and are unsympathetically identified with leftist politics by the non-leftist majority...

...This sub-Christian religion, still not uncommon in the South of the country, is essentially a Mediterranean fertility cult based on the worship of the Magna Mater that finds expression in Catholic forms of Marian devotion or the cult of the saints...

...its obsessive fear of "modern culture...

...Certainly ecclesiastical architecture plus the presence of the Vatican bears eloquent witness to the Catholic character of Italy, a catholicity not only attested to in its cultural artifacts but legitimated in concordat and law...

...Bellah distinguishes (and quite rightly, I believe) a "sub-Christian" or "pre-Christian" religion that often is lumped under the general heading of Catholicism...

...The referendum was overwhelmingly in favor of the retention of the divorce laws with favorable majorities in previously solid areas of Catholic influence...

...This worldview (though not necessarily in the Gramscian mode) is vividly alive in the industrial north today and, as Bellah notes, forms a quasi-religious subculture the fraternity of the union...

...Despite its image outside of the country (fostered, in no small part, by transalpine theological critics who are forever talking about the Italian-dominated Curia), the Italian Catholic Church is far from being a monolithic structure...

...Less Cheery Picture Bellah's analysis of religious strains in Italy is valuable for its systematic study of the interfaces of Italian "Civil Religion...

...for the purpose of the paper, religion is described under the rubric of "systems of ultimate meaning...

...Nor do I think that one can simply enlarge the picture with Bellah's categories since they do not do justice to the shifting allegiances and the degree of flexibility now endemic to the Italian religious scene...

...53 percent felt that the Church had no competency in matters of divorce...

...This "Catholicism of Aggiorrmmento" has attracted a fair number of university intellectuals and political figures who still feel firmly attracted to, and rooted in, the intellectual tradition of Catholicism...

...His analysis uses a horizontal line model moving from right to left, but without any nuanced analysis of relative numerical strength or ideological clout on the larger population...

...The paradigm of this view has been supplied in the novels of Guareschi who entertained vast numbers of readers with the struggles of the redoubtable Don Camillo struggling with his friend/ enemy Peppone, the Communist mayor...

...Yet the slippage of the Catholic Church is not confined merely to the proletarian classes...

...Still moving to the left are those groups who have opted for a more intimate, small-group based spirituality with a highly active social program oriented either to the domesitc scene (one thinks of the student groups such as Giovent Studentesca) or to the larger problems of the world and especially to the world of the underdeveloped nations (e.g...

...the ethics of the thirst for social justice...

...Delia Pergola, for one thing, does not take into account the rise of the Evangelicals (such as the Waldensians) who are now less in a cultural ghetto and more and more socially aware...

...Officially tolerated by the Church, this "sub-Christian" strain has been depicted in the writings of novelists such as Carlo Levi, in travel writers such as H. V. Morton and Norman Douglas, and by various scholars...

...Church practice in such borgate is minimal while the "new religious" of the extreme Leftists receive an enthusiastic hearing and are phenomenally successful at convert making...

...There is no doubt that this struggle will be the ultimate test of the Catholic Church's power in Italy since the Church is far more committed to an anti-abortion stand than it ever was on the question of divorce...

...There are few indications to show that this decline will be reversed in the near future...

...and 72 percent felt that the Church had no real interest in or understanding of the working class...

...This mosaic-like picture of the political Left in Italy has a mirror image in the Italian Catholic Church...

...Even in the cities of Sicily, notoriously conservative in these matters, the pro-divorce factions won handy majorities...

...Its residue is in the small, but noisy Neo-Fascist part of today (M.S.I...

...In the Roman suburb of San Basilio, with a population that ranges from thirty to forty thousand people (the Commune is just not sure of the number), the median income per capita is about $25 in an economy that has a price scale approaching that of the United States and a 24 percent rate of inflation...

...There is some consensus though, that the Catholic Church has suffered a great blow to its moral prestige and, apart from the question of the motivation behind the vote, it will be increasingly harder for the Church to command total attention on ethical matters...

...Mani Tese which bears a close similarity to the English Oxfam movement...

...It was a total humanistic world view...

...These groups tend towards an intense evangelical spirituality and show, at least among some of their numbers, a "benign indifference" towards ecclesiastical authority...

...j.awrence s. Cunningham is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University, Tallahassee...

...Under this rubric (and borrowing somewhat, but adding to Benedetto Croce), Bellah sees five religions in Italy that range from the intensely experiential to the more intensely intellectual and/or philosophical...

...Croce had in mind the liberalism of the nineteenth century which he saw as personal, idealistic and historically organic...

...These communities are openly sympathetic to working class inspirations, rely heavily on a Marxist analysis of the social situation, and cultivate close ties both with other Christian bodies and the extra-parliamentary Left...

...Delia Pergola's classification of the Italian Church is not totally satisfactory for the simple reason that, like most similar taxonomies, it cannot fit all of the currents of religion into a neat classication...

...It is a morbidly romantic view of life that appeals to a pseudo-reading of history and a glorification of what was belligerent, necrophiliac and socially nihilistic...

...A more specialized survey, reported in the semi-authoritative Jesuit magazine Civiltd Cattolica [October 5, 1974...

...Closer observers of the Italian political scene realize that such a simplistic dichotomy simply will not do...

...While there was been an intense debate on the significance of the referendum issue since May 1974 (the articles of George Galli, Arturo Parisi, Luigi Pedrazzi and Roberto Leonardo in the June issue of // Mulino, pp...

...At the extreme left of the ecclesial spectrum are the now fairly numerous dissident Catholic groups who are in open contestation with the hierarchy and, in some cases, with an open rupture from ecclesiastical authority...

...to 35 percent in 1965...

...a fierce anti-Communism...

...the historical celebration of the Black Mass...

...his purpose being more to assess intellectual positions and less to assess the power base...

...Delia Pergola's analysis shows the diverse nature of the Catholic Church just as the sociological analysis of many shows just how shaky the mainline Church is in fact...

...Despite the tight discipline of the Italian Communist party, the political Left in reality is fragmented into competing sub-parties that range from the intellectually respectable Manifesto Movement to the numerically small, but highly active, Maoist groups that manage to fill Italian headlines with their acts of industrial sabotage, criminal violence and political kidnappings...

...the most recent soundings, done in 1974, sets the figure at 30 percent...

...It is equally well known that Italy has vast enclaves of anti-Catholic sentiment most clearly manifested in the largest Communist Party outside the Eastern Bloc in Europe together with the older tradition of anti-clericalism endemic in liberal politics and the old line socialism found in such provinces as Emilia...

...In Italy itself, sociological analysis of the current state of Italian religion has not as yet systematically explored this intricate network of value systems...

...At the extreme right of the spectrum stands traditional Catholicism with its more or less acceptance of a Tridentine ecclesiology...

...Antonio Gramsci proposed an alternative worldview that could make its appeal to the large masses of the working class in Italy a worldview that was dialectical, revolutionary and socialist...

...It seems that one who takes a close look at the Italian scene must firmly eschew the popular cliches about a highly organized and tightly monolithic religious structure in Italy...

...According to a recent Doxa survey (an opinion research center of national reputation), 53 percent of the Italian people were regular communicants in 1956...

...Because of the immense amount of publicity that several of these groups have received in the Italian and foreign press (notably the community of Isolotto near Florence and Oregina near Genoa), their significance has perhaps been overestimated...

...There are some preliminary indicators to show that the Church's moral influence is also failing with the middle classes...

...It has done, however, a goodly amount of work on the condition of the Roman Catholic Church in the country and this analysis has revealed less than a cheery picture of rapid urbanization, the depression of the agricultural culture with its accompanying decline a rural based religious practice, aiid ideological spasms in the Church itself in these post-aggiornamento years...

...73-80], surveyed some pastorally oriented sociological research done in working class enclaves north of Rome in and around the city of Orvieto 70 percent of the adults surveyed favored forms of birth control beyond the periodic abstinence allowed by Pope Paul's Humanae Vitae...

...Since the victory of the Lay political parties in France on this issue, there has been a high feeling that the same victory could very well be achieved in Italy...

...Some of the priest leaders of these communities are married and almost all have secular occupations in order to support themselves...

...D'Annunzio was the prophet of the movement while it culminated in Mussolini's attempt to instill a fervent acceptance of Roman Destiny and a Neo-Roman Empire...

...The major efforts of the Italian government to industrialize the country after the post-war reconstruction period has caused massive movements of essentially emarginated people to leave the rural areas in search of work in the cities...

...In short, Delia Pergola equates Italian religion with Italian Catholicism...

...Yet, as Bellah noted, it had its influence on the development of Italian political awareness in its day...

...Bellah conceives of religion in a far broader context than institutional religion...

...Bare statistics give some indication of the shift in religious practice...

...Nor are relations between the Left and the Catholic Church always so rigidly divided witness the more Marxist orientation of the Catholic Labor Movement and the Movement for Christian Socialism...

...Outside the ken of these forms of Catholicism there are two opposed and competing forms of religiousness the idealistic liberalism of Croce and the dynamic Marxist socialism of Antonio Gramsci...

...Slightly to the left of this position are those groups fairly influential in Italian public life who are more socially oriented in their politics, mildly critical of the religious and clerical structures of the Vatican, and more inclined to experimentation with newer parish forms or alternatives to parish structure...

...The referendum of May 12, 1974, in which the voters were asked to decide whether the earlier passed divorce laws should be repealed or not, was a real shock to both the Christian Democratic party and the Roman Catholic Church...