Catholicism in Modern Italy

Religion, Society and Politics since 1861

John Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134556748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

John Pollard's book surveys the relationship between Catholicism and the process of change in Italy from Unification to the present day. Central to the book is the complex set of relationships between traditional religion and the forces of change. In a broad sweep, Catholicism in Modern Italy looks at the cultural, social, political and economic aspects of the Catholic church and its relationship to the different experiences across Italy over this dramatic period of change and 'modernisation'.

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION

THIS IS A STUDY OF THE COMPLEX SET of relationships between religion in Italy and the forces of change, or ‘modernisation’, that swept over the peninsula in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its purpose is to provide a synoptic historical account of the changing role of religion, very largely but not exclusively Catholicism, in the life of Italian people, civil society and politics since the unification of the Italian State in 1861. Where appropriate, I shall focus attention on the vicissitudes of the religious minorities in Italy, Jews, non-Catholic Christians and, more recently, non-Christian religions such as the Buddhists and Muslims, as well as tracing the development of secularist and more nakedly anti-clerical opposition to the power of the Church. The principal focus will be on the development of the religious beliefs and practices of the Italian people and of the institutional church in Italy, and their responses to successive waves of ‘modernisation’.

By ‘modernisation’ I mean, first of all, those political ideas and policies emerging from the Enlightenment and French Revolution with which their protagonists, in a rationalising and reforming programme, sought to ‘modernise’ the functioning of the Church and its economic and legal roles in civil society, and its relations with the state, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ecclesiastical policies of the ‘Liberal Revolution’ in the period from 1830 onwards was, of course, derived from that programme, but in one particular respect they went beyond it. Because the moderate liberals were engaged in uniting Italy between 1858 and 1870, the policies were potentially more dangerous to Catholicism throughout the peninsula. In particular, they sought to downplay the Roman character of Italian Catholicism, i.e. its ultimate loyalty and obedience to the papacy in Rome, subordinate the Church to the (liberal) State and destroy the temporal power of the popes, i.e. the territorial sovereignty that they had enjoyed for over a thousand years as rulers of the Papal States of central Italy. The central ideas of the Enlightenment – rationalism, secularism, deism and even atheism – would endure and prove subversive of Catholicism as it was believed and practised.

A further experience of ‘modernisation’ came with the advent of industrialisation, la prima industrializzazione, in Italy from the 1880s until just before the outbreak of the First World War. The economic and social changes – migration and the creation of industrial towns and cities–which that process generated, and their political consequence, the emergence of a revolutionary Socialist working class movement with a materialistic and atheistic ideological base, were to present a major challenge to Italian Catholicism over the next century and, in the short term, to bring a new, though limited, form of secularisation in their wake. By ‘secularisation’ I mean ‘the historical process whereby society and culture is liberated from the control of religion.’¹ The depth and breadth of that process would vary throughout the period with which we are dealing. In this context, the word ‘lay’ is used here in relation to those members of the Church not belonging to the clergy. It is also used in relation to those individuals, groups or political parties that opposed Church influence on Italian society and the institutional state: the words ‘laic’ and ‘secularist’ are used in the same sense.

Another major process of secularisation was set in train by the economic ‘miracle’ and American cultural ‘invasion’ of the 1950s and 1960s. The effects of these two phenomena were to prove more far-reaching than the changes of the prima industrializzazione of the 1880–1914 period. The ‘new secularisation’ that they produced signified the turning away of a large part of the Italian population from the traditional, ‘official’ Catholicism of the institutional church to a more nebulous, ‘private’ religious belief and (non)practice from the 1960s onwards, or to other, non-Catholic, religions. Coupled with the effects of the Second Council of the Vatican (1962–65), it also seriously shook the internal structures of the institutional church by creating communities of ‘dissident’ Catholics. Arguably, these tendencies were accentuated by the massive structural changes in the Italian, and global, economy, especially the communications ‘revolution’ in the last two decades of the twentieth century. They were reinforced by other effects of globalisation on Italy from the 1980s onwards, especially immigration and related new religious and cultural influences.

Two totalitarian political movements emerged in the twentieth century to pose a potentially serious challenge to Italian Catholicism – Fascism and Communism. While Communism may be regarded as an ‘outgrowth’ of the Enlightenment, albeit one refracted by the dominant influence of the Russian experience of Marxism in practice, Italian Fascism was much more the ideological product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century antirational revolt against the Enlightenment. Consequently, Catholicism would more readily adapt to Fascism and, indeed, in the short term seek an accommodation with it. It sought no such accommodation with Communism, and in the decades following the end of the Second World War Catholicism and Communism would be engaged in a fierce struggle for cultural, social and political hegemony in Italy.

Throughout this book, a key focus of analysis will be the tension between the ‘official’ religiosity of the institutional church as that essentially established by the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century and ‘popular religion’, the beliefs and practices of the people, which in some places were often in conflict with it. It is clear that, as in other parts of Europe, in certain regions of Italy that tension was acute, especially in the south. This brings me to the phenomenon of regional diversity in Italy. The relationships between the forces of modernisation and Italian Catholicism were bound to be complex given the diversity in economic and social structures, popular culture and religiosity not only between north and south but between regions and even within the narrower bounds of individual provinces in the peninsula. With generations of undergraduate students I have encountered the assumption that Catholicism, the Church, was ‘stronger’ in the south of Italy because that area was more rural, agrarian, ‘backward’ and poorer than the north. Until recently, it could be argued that the reverse was true, that the official religiosity of Catholicism, the role of the institutional church in civil society and the capacity of the Church to mobilise Catholics in order to influence politics was much stronger in certain, albeit largely rural, regions of northern and central Italy than in the south. Indeed, many Italian historians have talked about the survival of pre-Christian religions, paganism and superstition, as being distinguishing features of society in southern Italy.² Other factors, legal, financial and social, meant that in the post-unification period the Church in the south was institutionally weak, and this persisted even beyond the Fascist era. The wide-ranging diversity of Italy’s regions, north and south, both in terms of its historical division into a number of states, but also stark regional variations within the pre-national states, makes it more appropriate, therefore, to talk about ‘Italian churches’ rather than a single national church, at least until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To avoid confusion, it should be noted that historians and ecclesiologists also sometimes refer to individual dioceses as ‘churches’.

This is not essentially a research monograph, that is, the direct product of substantial fresh research into archival and other primary sources; rather it is the indirect product of research, reading, writing and teaching going back many years. Hence, those familiar with my previously published work will find some strong echoes of it in this book. The book is intended as a general introduction to a subject that has been many, many times touched on in monographs and other studies, but not focused upon in the way in which I do here. It is not primarily intended for an exclusively scholarly readership; it is, in the first instance, aimed at lecturers and teachers of elements of modern Italian history and modern Italian studies, as well as students at sixth-form, undergraduate and graduate levels and at the more general public. I hope that it will also be used as an essential reference work for scholars in the field of religious history, particularly those who do not have a reading knowledge of Italian because there is an almost complete absence of studies of the history of religion in Italy in the English language.

The book is thus intended to fill a gap: much has been written in English on the history of religion in most countries of western Europe in the modern period, most notably the Benelux countries, Britain, France, Germany and Spain.³ One of the most formative from my point of view is Hugh McLeod’s Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1970,⁴ and another is Frances Lannon’s Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy; The Catholic Church in Spain 1875–1975.⁵ What distinguishes my approach from that of McLeod is my emphasis on the role of religion/the Church in politics: this book is, therefore, closer to that of Lannon in scope and spirit as I have tried to keep in balance the personal experience of religion, its role in society and the influence of the Church in politics. But it is also clear that the Italian experience differs in one crucially important respect from that of other European Catholic countries. Italy is, of course, the seat of the papacy: the bishop of Rome is not only the metropolitan of the Roman Province and primate of Italy, he is also supreme pontiff, and as such is the infallible head of the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world. This presence has inevitably rendered Italian Catholicism more, much more, ‘political’ in its manifestations, and for this reason it has not always been possible to preserve a perfect balance, chapter by chapter, between religion, society and politics. Indeed, religion and politics in Italy have been inextricably intertwined during the period covered by this book, and still are, in a way that is not comparable in other European country.

A work that perhaps comes closest to mine in its purpose is Atkin and Tallett’s Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750.⁶ That said, their book is obviously very much wider in geographical scope than this one. David Kertzer has tried to provide a brief guide to some of the issues discussed here for the nineteenth century in his essay, ‘Religion and Society, 1789–1892’, and Alice Kelikian has attempted much the same in her ‘The Church and Catholicism’ for the twentieth century.⁷ Jon Dunnage also provides some excellent insights into the role of the Church/religion in Italian society in his book, Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History.⁸ Otherwise, books dealing with Catholicism in modern Italy tend to focus on relations between church and state, such as Carlo Arturo Jemolo’s magisterial treatment of the subject in Church and State in Italy, 1850–1960 or Daniel Binchy’s Church and State in Fascist Italy,⁹ or my own The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–1932.¹⁰ Alternatively, they focus on the Catholic/Christian Democratic movement, such as Richard Webster’s The Cross and the Fasces or John Molony’s The Emergence of Political Catholicism in Italy.¹¹ Needless to say, there is an enormous literature on the post-1945 Christian Democratic Party.¹²

I have tried to keep notes to a minimum. Where they are provided, they are mainly as references for quotations or to give substance to major statements, but sometimes also as suggestions for contextual or further specialist reading. I have endeavoured to provide reading in English, but sometimes that is clearly not possible. I have also sought to place the history of Catholicism in Italy in its necessary economic, political and social contexts. Lest the complexities of the hierarchical organisation and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, which were effectively shaped in Italy under the influence of the late Roman Empire, are unfamiliar, I have provided a glossary of (especially ecclesiastical) terms. Where not otherwise stated, all translations are by the author.

Chapter 2
CATHOLICISM AND THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION (1815–70)

Introduction

ITALIAN CATHOLICISM FACED ITS FIRST SERIOUS challenge from ‘modernisation’ during the period of the Risorgimento, that is between 1815 and 1870 when the liberal and national movements in Italy developed, matured and eventually achieved Italian independence from Austria and unification under the House of Savoy, the ruling family of Piedmont-Sardinia, with the capital at Rome. The chief casualty of the ‘Liberal Revolution’ thus carried out in Italy was undoubtedly the Church. Its property, privileges and legal status in civil society were severely curtailed by the secularising legislation of successive moderate (conservative) liberal governments first in Piedmont-Sardinia and then in the new Kingdom of Italy. Perhaps even more significant for the future development of the Catholic Church as a whole was the fact that in the process of unification the ‘temporal power’ of the popes, their political sovereignty over a swathe of territory in central Italy, was finally abolished. The pope’s reaction to that event, along with the proclamation of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility at the First Council of the Vatican (1869–70), helped to accelerate the development of the process whereby the papacy was transformed into a modern, highly centralised institution.

The background: the impact of the Enlightenment and French Revolution on Italian Catholicism

Under the ancien régime in Europe, Catholicism as an established church was not only deeply embedded in the institutions of the state; it could be described as a major part of the institutional structure of monarchies. It was also deeply embedded in civil society, since its laws governed so much of the life of the people, marriage, education, and the provision of medical care and poor relief etc., a sort of ‘cradle to grave’ material and spiritual welfare state.¹ Moreover, possession of such rights of citizenship as existed under the ancien régime was restricted to those who conformed to the state religion (which was, of course, also true in Protestant states). Monarchs exercised varying degrees of control over ‘national’ churches, at the expense of the papacy, utilised their legal structures (canon law) as part of their rule and appointed their servants and friends to the highest ecclesiastical offices as rewards. In broader terms, those offices were a happy hunting ground for careers for large sections of the nobility, the parochial clergy being largely drawn from the urban and rural middle class, and the peasantry.²

Much of this changed in the period after 1750. So the structures of the institutional church in Italy, and to a lesser extent the religiosity of the people, after the end of the Napoleonic occupation in 1815 were very much the product of processes of reform and revolution going back 50 or 60 years. The first changes had come in the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s, as a result of the introduction of the ideas of the Enlightenment into Italy. Despite the flourishing of a specifically Italian form of enlightened Catholicism during the pontificate of Benedict XIV (1740–58), the ultimate development of the Enlightenment in Italy, and especially the ideas of men such as Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Carlantonio Pilati, were used in battles against the Church, the consequent development and implementation of the prog...

Table of contents

• Christianity and society in the modern world
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 2 CATHOLICISM AND THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION (1815–70)
• Chapter 3 THE CATHOLIC RECOVERY (1870–1914)
• Chapter 4 ITALIAN CATHOLICISM AND THE CHALLENGES OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (1880–1914)
• Chapter 5 ITALIAN CATHOLICS, THE GREAT WAR AND THE RISE OF FASCISM (1914–29)
• Chapter 6 FASCISM, WAR AND RESISTANCE (1929–45)
• Chapter 7 THE AGE OF CATHOLIC ‘TRIUMPHALISM’(1945–58)
• Chapter 8 THE NEW SECULARISATION (1958–78)
• Chapter 9 ITALY IN THE AGE OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM (1978 TO THE PRESENT DAY)
• Chapter 10 CONCLUSION
• GLOSSARY AND ABBREVIATIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX