The Concordat currently in force, which regulates relations between the Italian State and the Catholic Church, was signed on February 18, 1984 by the then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and by the Vatican secretary of state Agostino Casaroli. It is the fruit of revision, provided for by Article 7 of the Constitution, of the Concordat signed on 11 February 1929 by Benito Mussolini and by the cardinal Pietro Gasparri in the context of the Lateran Pacts, which marked the conciliation between the State and the Holy See, with the solution of the Roman question. The problem opened in 1870 with the end of the Papal State, when the Italian troops had entered Rome by force through the breach of Porta Pia and Pope Pius IX had declared himself a prisoner. The so-called law of guarantees, approved by the Italian Parliament in 1871 to ensure the Pontiff the exercise of his spiritual mission, was – in fact – declared unacceptable by the Vatican.
The Treaty and the Concordat
After almost sixty years of difficult coexistence, which had seen – for – the relations between State and Church gradually smooth out, the coming to power of Mussolini, who certainly did not have the concerns of his liberal predecessors about the secularity of the state, in 1929 allowed the conclusion of an overall agreement consisting of two agreements: the Treaty, with which Italy recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See and the new Vatican City State, with an annexed financial agreement to compensate the Church for the damages suffered with the nineteenth-century legislation in terms of ecclesiastical entities; the Concordat, containing the regulation of a series of issues about the exercise of worship, the statute of priests and bishops, the recognition of civil effects on Catholic marriage, the discipline of ecclesiastical goods, the extension of confessional religious teaching in schools. After the fall of fascism, the Constituent Assembly approved article 7 of the Constitution, which acknowledges the Lateran Pacts but at the same time provides that their modifications, accepted by both parties, do not require a constitutional revision procedure. A solution voted by the moderate forces, in the lead the Christian Democrats, but also approved by the Communist Party (not by the Socialist Party and by other secular forces), with the aim of protecting religious peace in Italy.
Ddl Zan, news, debate, insights
Exercise of the magisterium and manifestation of thought at risk
The anachronistic nature of some provisions of the Concordat subsequently induced the parties to enter into negotiations for their revision, which intensified in the early 1980s and resulted in the agreement signed in Villa Madama by Craxi and Casaroli in 1984. The new Concordat, which was later ratified by Parliament with a large majority, includes 14 articles plus an additional 7-point protocol and prescribes the overcoming of the principle according to which Catholicism is the state religion. Other qualifying points: the new method of financing Italian ecclesiastical institutions, then implemented through the mechanism of the taxpayers’ choice to allocate 8 per thousand of personal income tax to the State or the Church (later other religious confessions were added); the new discipline of the acknowledgment to civil effects of the nullity of religious marriages established by the ecclesiastical courts on the basis of canon law; the full freedom of the Church to establish schools whose pupils must be guaranteed treatment equivalent to that of those who attend state institutions; the new regulation of the teaching of the Catholic religion, with the right of pupils not to use it. Article 2 of the Villa Madama agreement then provides for full freedom for the Church to organize and exercise the magisterium and for Catholics to manifest their thoughts by any means. Principles that the Vatican believes run the risk of being compromised by the approval of the Zan bill on homophobia.
June 22, 2021 (change June 22, 2021 | 17:49)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
.