Italy's Surprisingly Favorable Environment for Religious Minorities

Abstract

International sources, including yearly reports on religious liberty issued by the United States Department of State, the Helsinki Commission, and the United Nations, suggest that Italy, comparatively speaking, offers one of the best environments for religious minorities. Unlike France, Germany, and Belgium, there is no official anticult activity, although there is some police watching of “cults.” However, when a police report (although more moderate than its French or Belgian counterparts) was disclosed in 1998, political criticism was directed primarily against the police for possible breaches of religious liberty rather than against the “cults” themselves. Anticult movements in Italy are small, underfinanced, and not particularly active. Even the most controversial religious movements operate in Italy in a climate of freedom and have consistently won their most important court cases. On 15 November 1991, the Rome Court determined that “flirty-fishing,” as practiced by The Family (formerly known as the Children of God), was not tantamount to prostitution and not illegal per se under Italian law. The Supreme Court has also determined, on two separate occasions, that Scientology is a religion, although it also maintained that Narconon, the drug rehabilitation program run by Scientology, is not in itself religious and, in consequence, not tax-exempt. A leading judge in Rome investigating the Unification Church for possible mistreatment of its members closed the case with no indictments in 1980. Jehovah’s Witnesses, denounced in France as the epitome of dangerous “sects,” have entered into a concordat signed by the Italian Prime Minister on 20 March 2000, allowing them to receive public funding (the concordat is due for ratification by parliament, and some opposition is expected). The Assemblies of God and the Seventh-day Adventists, investigated as possible “cults” in Belgium, already receive taxpayers’ money under similar concordats in Italy. All this may seem rather strange, when one considers that religious liberty is a fairly recent phenomenon in Italy (it was only incorporated after World War II into the country’s new constitution), and Catholic influence is probably more dominant here than anywhere else in the world. I will list six reasons which may explain why Italy’s situation is apparently so favorable in terms of religious minorities, although I will also mention some emerging trends that may cause this situation to change.