Catholics and politics after the Christian Democrats: the influential minority

Abstract

The Italian political history, since the unification of the nation in the nineteenth century, has been deeply marked by the influence of the Catholic Church and of the associations in the Catholic universe. For more than 40 years, since the beginning of the second post-war period, the Christian Democratic party had ruled continuously. Practicing Catholics' electoral choices toward this party lead scholars to talk about Catholic political unity. Yet, since the early 1990s, with the demise of the First Republic and the end of the Christian Democratic party experience – which disintegrated into various small parties – the relationship between politics, church and practicing Catholic voters has deeply changed. Church has transferred its political representation ‘from the party to the pulpit’. It has become a sort of lobby, which has followed a neutrality strategy from the parties and from political alignments, for about 10 years. More recently, the church and the catholic voters in part, seem to have shifted toward the center-right stance, in particular with respect to ethical issues. This article, based on this hypothesis, aims to address the transformation that has occurred in the relations between church, society and politics in Italy, focusing on the last decade.