The Italian Church in the Year of the Papal Succession

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2016

This editors' introduction opens a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies on the topic of 'Mapping Contemporary Catholic Politics in Italy'. It briefly identifies the political, sociological and ideational changes that have occurred in Catholic politics since the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party, and introduces the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the common threads and the important divergences in their analyses.

2016

This article aims to correlate the political rather than the pastoral action of Cardinal Camillo Ruini with the rise and consolidation of the politician Silvio Berlusconi from 1994 to 2007, set in the context of the major changes that occurred in the Catholic Church and in Italian republican politics during the 1980s and 1990s. The main theme is an ‘instrumental interaction’ between the two systems, Ruinismo and Berlusconismo, which only coincided at the level of political opportunity and gave rise to important synergies between two men who otherwise had nothing in common.

Constellations, 2017

This paper offers a close reading of the discourse on Italian fascism within the authoritative Italian Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica. The author shows that, when confronted with the fascist movement, La Civiltà Cattolica made no moves to oppose the regime, instead positioning itself so as to negotiate with and accommodate the fascist rhetoric. This decision was driven in part by the close alignment between the politics of Catholicism and fascism, and further fostered by the absence of a viable alternative political power. The essay also illustrates the manner in which Catholic intellectuals intuitively perceived some aspects of fascist totalitarianism and the ‘sacralisation of politics’ as threatening, particularly when confronted with manifestations of what was termed ‘political heresy’, along with certain features of fascist associationalism. However, despite their concerns no explicit rupture between Church and regime ever eventuated; on the contrary, some accounts imply an intended merger, however unstable it may have proven, between the ‘religious’ and ‘totalitarian’ goals of both parties.

2016

The aim of this paper is to investigate the decline of an institution—the Catholic Church in Early Modern age—by applying a model introduced by the political economist Albert O. Hirschman. In his most famous book (1970) Hirschman proposed a tripartite division in order to describe the reactions of consumers and citizens to the deterioration of companies, political organizations and States: exit, voice and loyalty. This model was born out of the author’s desire to convince economists of the importance and usefulness of a political concept such as ‘protest versus exit’, but even more interesting is the interplay among the three options, which has proved useful to analyze very different contexts. In fact, Hirschman’s classification could be fit as well to Early Modern Europe, when Western christians began to develop responses to deal with the crisis of the Roman Church, either deciding to remain loyal to their religious institution, or raising a protest about specific issues, or even j...

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2017

The aim of this paper is to investigate the decline of an institution-the Catholic Church in Early Modern age-by applying a model introduced by the political economist Albert O. Hirschman. In his most famous book (1970) Hirschman proposed a tripartite division in order to describe the reactions of consumers and citizens to the deterioration of companies, political organizations and States: exit, voice and loyalty. This model was born out of the author's desire to convince economists of the importance and usefulness of a political concept such as 'protest versus exit', but even more interesting is the interplay among the three options, which has proved useful to analyze very different contexts. In fact, Hirschman's classification could be fit as well to Early Modern Europe, when Western christians began to develop responses to deal with the crisis of the Roman Church, either deciding to remain loyal to their religious institution, or raising a protest about specific issues, or even joining one of the new born Protestant Churches or radical cults. In the following pages the model is applied to find a new approach to explain an old issue: the failure of a proper Protestant Reformation in Early Modern Italy. As Hirschman has suggested in more recent studies, loyalty, exit, and voice might be not mutually exclusive: in 16tʰ-century Italy, Nicodemism (as a doctrinal position combining all three elements), played a major role in keeping many of the faithful from choosing solely either exit or voice.

The paper is divided in five sections: 1) The origin of the secular-religious cleavage from the Italian unitary state to the end of “Prima Repubblica”, where we will first try to set out the historical and genetic framework which characterized the evolution of the Italian political system, from the birth of the unitary Italian state to the end of the so-called First Republic. We will analyze the different phases about the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Italian political system, paying particular attention to the dynamics of the Italian party system until the eve of so-called Second Re-public. From this analysis emerges as the unity of Catholics in politics, despite being a constant issue of the last century, has never been the only strategic option available to the Catholic Church to defend its values and interests. 2)Theoretical framework, where we explore the dimension of the solidarity concept in the main political traditions In this section, we will first try t...