End of the Concordat

...As a result of the agreement, Mussolini's Fascist government gained enormous international, as well as domestic, prestige...

...Others--ineluding the Vatican itself--agree that the Concordat is outdated, but maintain that it can be merely revised rather than dropped entirely...

...We have always refused anti-clericalism...

...In the 1950s a group calling themselves the Amici del Mondo (friends of the liberal review 11 Mondo) including such prominent intellectuals as Ernesto Rossi, Gaetano Salvemini and Luigi Salvatorelli, called for the abrogation of the Concordat...

...The Concordat greatly reenforced the hierarchy's power over the clergy...

...Cardia heads a special commission of the Italian Communist Party to investigate not only the Concordat question, but the whole gamut of Church-State relations...

...A more openly political Catholic movement, Cristiani per il Socialismo (Christians for Socialism), claims that the Concordat is not in the spirit of Vatican II which challenged the Church to renounce "certain legally acquired rights whose use could cast doubts on the sincerity of its witness...

...And the politicians have to share the guilt for this, by their tendency to assume that post hoc propter hoe" is a valid inference: whatever is good is the fruit of good government (thus the party in power), whatever is bad is the fault of bad government (thus the opposition...

...The Catholic Church is a reality that cannot be ignored, says Cardia...

...The "agreement," co-signedby Benito Mussolini in the name of Italy and Gasparri himself in the name of the Holy See at the Lateran Palace in Rome, became known as the Lateran Pact...

...We do not see ourselves as opposing Catholicism...

...But neither of these conditions can be counted upon with any certainty at present...

...Mussolini, boasted the Fascist press, had succeeded where everyone else, beginning with Cavour, had failed...

...Despite the noble declarations of reconciliation and concern for religious peace, however, the treaties had clear political dimensions...

...The Radical Party, for example, is leading a campaign for a popular referendum that would call for abrogation...

...We have learned many things from our Catholic culture," Cardia assured me, "among them, a sense of history and, above all, patience...

...Commonweal: 585...

...Despite a process of secularization (the electoral successes of the Communist party, the victory of the divorce referendum in which 60 percent of the Italians--67 percent in Rome--supported the divorce law and the new laws concerning education and the family have limited the i~fluence of the Church), the Catholic Church still remains an important force in Italian life...

...Since Gramsci, the Communists have always had an open hand policy toward the Catholics," Carlo Cardia, professor of canon law at the University of Cagliari, told me in a recent interview...

...No peace can be founded on laws that offend the civil conscience...

...Its leader, Lelio Basso, then general secretary of the Socialist Party, declared: "It is not a question of safeguarding religious peace...

...According to the Communists, some kind of Concordat is needed in Italy because of the country's particular history and political realities in which the Catholic Church has played a key role...

...Two months later-despite Togliatti's sacrifices in the name of Catholic-Communist unity--the Communists were expelled from the government and the Christian Democratic hegemony in Italian politics which was tO last three decades--began...

...Despite Communist (and Christian Democratic) opposition to the referendum, the Radicals now seem to be nearing their goal of bringing the 48-yearold issue before the Italian electorate...

...We do not want to give the Church any instrument that could be used for revindication or for creating a climate of victimization (the State refused to dialogue with us...

...The teaching of Catholic doctrine was to be considered fundamental to public education...

...The British public at present tends to blame the government for everything that goes wrong, and to expect it to do everything which is necessary, to put things right...

...In return the Catholic Church received recognition as the "sole religion of the State," was granted a series of financial and fiscal privileges and was given judicial supremacy in matters of religious marriages (which would be legally binding in the eyes of the State, but could only be dissolved by an ecclesiastical court...

...MARGO HAMMOND (Margo Hammond, who writes regularly for the Christian Science Monitor and other publications, is an American lreelance writer currently based in Rome...

...The pact also provided enormous tax breaks for the Church which, according to a recent investigation by the Italian magazine Europeo, owns onefourth of the City of Rome...

...Hence the apathy on which fascism breeds...

...Perhaps one of the most tedious, but also one of the most pernicious things about British politics today is the way that this boastful, puerile and illiterate fallacy is continuously employed by every politician in sight, to the great insult and detriment of the people as a whole...

...The Church is no longer a monolithic bloc," claims Cardia, "it has become pluralistic...

...Last November the Christian Democratic government finally presented a 14-point revision project...

...The Ladywood turnout was 45 percent of the electorate...

...BRIAN WICKER (Brian Wicker is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...The lay front--in the majority--adamantly refused...

...In a last minute about-face, however, the Italian Communists, led by Palmiro Togliatti, broke away from the lay ranks and swung the vote in favor of inserting the Concordat in Article 7 of the Constitution, claiming that the party did not want a split for religious reasons between the Communist masses and Catholic workers...

...This would only serve to support the more conservative forces in the Church...

...The Italian Communist Party has launched a call, however, for a "compromesso storico" (historic compromise), that is an alliance between Italy's transitional forces: the Catholics and the Communists...

...After the fall of Fascism, the Constituent Assembly ----composed of all the anti-Fascist forces--was called upon to decide the future of the Concordat...

...Is their alliance with the Christian Democrats (who needless to say support revision rather than abrogation) on the Concordat question a political maneuver aimed at bringing about the "compromesso storico...

...The Gonella Commission was formed and in June 1970 the first meetings between the Holy See and the Italian State took place...

...Not all agree, however, on just what is to be done with it...

...As such, it is a standing invitation to fascist thuggery...

...In 1971 the House again approved a motion to promote negotiations between the two parties to "modify the Concordat in order to bring it into harmony with the evolution of time and the development of democratic life...

...We are more confident than the other lay parties that there is a large part of the Church that will push for such a change...

...Priests, for example, cannot hold any public office or job and cannot be members of political parties...

...Whether the choice is for revision or for abrogation, however, the process will be long--and most likely painful...

...The revised Concordat, insist the Communists, must be based on principIes of liberty...

...The physical decay of Ladywood is not only a disgrace: it is a potent symbol of the neglect by politicians of what matters most to ordinary people...

...This Spring, however, the Radical Party began collecting the 500,000 signatures needed to bring about a popular referendum calling for the abrogation of the Concordat...

...Composed of the Lateran Treaty in which the Italian state recoguized the sovereignty of the Vatican and the Concordat which regulated the Church's activities within the Italian state, the pact was, according to its authors, a long-awaited solution to the so-called "Roman question" which dated from the time of Italian unity when the Italian army had put an end to the temporal power of the Popes...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM ROME END OF THE CONCOBDAT...

...Some believe that it simply should be abrogated, insisting that it is anti-democratic, authoritarian, illiberal and unconstitutional (the recognition of Catholicism as a state religion violates the constitutional principle of religious freedom...

...Revision or abrogation...

...The Christian Democrats, then leading a coalition government that included the Italian Communists, asked that it be incorporated unaltered into the new Italian Constitution...

...In the latter category are the Italian Communists who after three decades of exile from the "stanza dei 16 September 1977:584 bottoul" (control room) are at the door of power once again: the present government, composed solely of Christian Democrats, owes its existence to a Communist abstention...

...An agreement between Caesar and Peter has finally been reached," Cardinal Pietro Gasparri announced in February 1929...

...The recent controversy created by the transmission of Dario Fo's Mistero Bul~o (considered offensive by the Vatican) on national television is an example, he claims, of the type of conservative rer that can occur if the Church feels isolated...

...Mussolini has become the leader of Catholic conservatism," wrote a London newspaper, "able to unite around himself all of moderate Europe...

...The House, nevertheless, voted to continue negotiations...

...The vote was taken on March 25, 1947...

...The director of L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, commenting on the proposal wrote: "Any act or event that could contribute to religious peace is welcome...

...Not until 1967, however, did the House of Deputies approve a motion concerning the Concordatmand then only to instruct the government to look into possibilities of revision...

...But a Church that acts like a capitalist state needs to defend its power...

...In short, the Concordat destroyed any idea of Church-State separation...

...The other lay parties hinted that the proposal was the result of a compromise between the Communists and the Christian Democrats...

...Unlike the Communists, however, many Catholic dissenters are less confident that the institutional Church will so readily give up its privileges...

...an attempt on the life of a Pope is punishable by death although the death penalty was abolished in Italy in 1947...

...Now thirty years later--and almost a half a century since the signing of the Concordat--Italy is reexamining the infamous pact...

...The Communists called it a "step forward," although they termed it insufficient especially regarding matters of religious education, marriage and the fiscal privileges of the Church...

...A poor Church does not need to make a pact with the State," affirmed Agostino Zerpinati, a Franciscan, at a recent convention of the Movimento di Comunit~t Cristiane di Base (Movement of Grass Root Christian Communities) composed of 70,000 people grouped in 300 communities throughout Italy...