Catholicism In Italy Research Articles

The Northern League (1991–2020)

Abstract This article aims to clarify the attitude of the Italian Northern League (Lega Nord) toward the Catholic Church and Catholic faith, since its creation in 1991. The article examines the evolution of the party from the merger of the northern regionalist parties under the leadership of Umberto Bossi (1991–2012) until its current form and its reengineering by its new leader, Matteo Salvini, as a national(ist) League (Lega) aiming to win votes and mandates all over Italy and to become the dominant party of the Italian right. Be it under Bossi or Salvini, the Lega Nord/Lega has always opposed both the humanist teaching of the Catholic Church and mainstream Catholic social organizations, while pretending to defend the “Catholic identity” of the “North,” before turning to the entire country. Under Salvini’s leadership, the Lega joined forces with some rightist Catholic groups prone to complain about Pope Francis’s deemed treason of the Catholic identity, and so reinforced its conservative orientation. As I will show in this article, in the medium term, the enduring success of the Lega Nord/Lega illustrates the decline of mainstream Catholicism in Italy.

Od projektu ideowego do pragmatycznej polityki: Chrześcijańska demokracja we Włoszech w początkach zimnej wojny 1943‑1948

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The paper attempts a comparative analysis of competitive concepts of development of the Italian Christian democratic party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) in the immediate post-WWII period. RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The Italian Christian demo‑ cratic party was created in 1942 as a joint effort of various currents of political Catholicism in Italy. The common denominator of groups originating from pre[1]war Christian democratic circles, student organizations and catholic, antifascist intellectuals, was an urge to overcome the legacy of fascism and to create an Ital‑ ian democracy founded on Christian principles. Between 1943 and 1948 DC un‑ derwent an evolution from a cadre party of a distinctive ideological profile to a mass party with loosely defined ideological principles. The application of a his‑ torical reconstruction of the subsequent phases of clashes between competitive conceptions of party allows to identify the timing and positions in this debate. THE ARGUMENTATION PROCESS: The analysis opens by recalling the context of the dissolution of the Christian democratic party in Italy in 1926 which is followed by the reconstruction of the consolidation process that took place during the WWII. Next, the focus is shifted towards the wartime ideology and programmatic achievements of catholic groups. The fourth part of the text focuses on the discussions between the leader of the DC, Alcide De Gasperi conducted with Giuseppe Dossetti – on one hand – and the conservative mem‑ bers of ecclesiastical hierarchy – on the other. The stake of this debates was the future of the party: while De Gasperi argued for remaining in the centre of the political scene, Dossetti wanted an alliance with the “popular parties” – social‑ ists and, not unconditionally, communists, whereas the hierarchy pushed for the establishment of a catholic-conservative bloc. RESEARCH RESULTS: The attempted re construction allowed to point out that De Gasperi’s success – which consisted in holding the party unity and autonomy from the Church, had its price, which was the loosening of the ideo‑ logical cohesion of the party. DC entered the cold war as a federation of circles and interest groups held together by a will of prolonging their power. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECCOMENDATIONS: In the concluding part of the paper I stressed the need for an in-depth study of the catholic political culture of the post-WWII period in order to fully understand the differences between Christian democrats and Christian democratic ideas from the interwar period, the hopes and goals of the wartime programmatic work, and the Cold War period when often these ideas were confronted with the pragmatism of a day-to-day politics. This is particularly important given the secularisation of the Christian democratic party in the post-1945 period.

La spiritualité comme terrain d’entente entre la religion et le sécularisme : une approche ethnographique

This article is based on ethnographic research about the intersections of contemporary forms of spirituality and Catholicism in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal and analyses what social actors mean when they say that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR). We need to go beyond this self-description and try to understand why spirituality is increasingly being constructed in opposition to religion and what our informants mean, when they say that they are spiritual. With this approach we discover that spirituality, religion and secularism are not completely distinct categories but mutually constitute each other (Asad, 2003 ; Fedele and Knibbe, 2013, 2020) and that the SBNR are not necessarily unchurched (Fedele, 2013 ; Fedele and Knibbe, 2013 ; Ammerman, 2013a). Through ethnographic examples I show how spirituality represents a safe middle ground between religion and secularism. It offers a lingua franca that allows describing religious experiences in increasingly secularized societies. This spiritual lingua franca is particularly useful when addressing issues related to gender and sexuality because it allows embracing secular values without renouncing to be religious.

Antonio Gramsci on religion

This article provides an introduction to Antonio Gramsci’s understanding and analysis of religion. It shows that Gramsci’s conceptual constellation and key terms – from hegemony to organic intellectuals, from moral and intellectual reform to common sense – were formulated precisely in his critique to religion, and specifically to Catholicism in Italy. Rejecting the determinism and reductionism of orthodox Marxism, Gramsci saw religion as an active mode of experiencing social and historical reality, and came to conceptualize Marxism (the philosophy of praxis) as a new secular religion. The article demonstrates how Gramsci subtly and deftly problematized the relationship between religion, power, and politics in society. It will in particular foreground his astute reading of religion in practices and in common sense. Gramsci’s views on religion, this article argues, offer insightful theoretical tools that could be of considerable benefit for scholars (sociologists, anthropologists, and historians) examining religious phenomena in a global post-modern world.

On the current absence and future improbability of political Catholicism in Italy

Clerical ‘non-negotiable values’ were actively promoted by right-wing governments in the 2000s, the Monti government that replaced them was strongly supported by the Vatican and the Italian bishops, and the current left-wing government is led by a former member of the Catholic popolari who attends Mass every Sunday. But this article argues that, rather than a new golden age of political Catholicism, the return of Catholicism to Italian politics has taken a ‘low intensity’ form which lacks the robust combination of ideas, leaders, organizations, and interests that informed earlier, genuinely political forms of Catholic engagement. The article demonstrates this by focusing on the ‘Todi movement’, which played a crucial role in the Monti government, and on Matteo Renzi’s current leadership of the Partito democratico and the national government. It also proposes a theoretical framework to explain the apparent contradiction between the high visibility and the low political relevance of Catholicism in Italian politics.

Beyond Essentialist and Functionalist Analyses of the "Politicisation of Religion": The Evolution of Religious Parties in Political Catholicism and Political Islam

The debate about “politics and religion” has already rejected essentialist claims of fundamental differences in the impact of religion on politics in different cultures. This article will argue that political Islam in Turkey and political Catholicism in Italy and Germany adopted remarkably similar patterns of cross-class coalitions and policies for a “reconciliation of capitalism and democracy”. First, religious parties developed as mass integration parties which already encompassed cross-class coalitions. Second, in the aftermath of political and economic crises these parties transformed into catch-all parties with a pronounced neo-liberal agenda which was given a religious justification. Third, at the same time these parties continued to sponsor policies and organizations which cushioned and supplemented an uneven economic development. Fourth, the parties kept traditional family policies which helped attracting a significant female electorate. “Organized religion” provided religious parties with a potential electorate, ancillary organizations and ideological concepts; however, their role in this political evolution changed. The conclusion will discuss whether these findings can be generalized.

Suffering As the Path to Acceptance: Parents of Gay and Lesbian Young People Negotiating Catholicism in Italy

This article investigates the experiences of parents of gay men and lesbians (GL) as they negotiate the influential Catholic discourse on homosexuality in Italy, and their Catholic belonging and practice. The analysis is based upon in-depth interviews with 46 parents of gay and lesbian people. We explore how parents who are heavily involved in the religious community negotiate their role within it, but also how, more generally, parents frame their notions of what it means to be lesbian or gay in relation to Catholic discourse. Parents draw upon different, and often seemingly contradictory, cultural repertoires in order to combine, negotiate, or integrate what public discourse constructs as irreconcilable positions: acceptance of gay and lesbian lives and identities and Catholic belonging. The notion of the homosexual as being destined to undergo suffering provides room for acceptance of their child's sexual identity whilst preserving heteronormative assumptions. This frame constitutes an alternative to rejection, which is at odds with parents’ ideas of the family as being based on unconditional love. It also provides a bridge with therapeutic culture and narratives of liberation from suffering that inform, especially, middle-class family relations and the cultural resources available to them.

The ‘sectarian’ Church. Catholicism in Italy since John Paul II

Many surveys report that the rate of church attendance in Italy is still very high, one of the highest in Europe. Are these data reliable? Is there really a ‘Catholic effect’ in Italy, a persistent popular affection for the Catholic Church, a slower rate of secularization? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to these questions but there are many elements that would contradict the optimistic (for the Catholic Church) view: 1) different (and more pessimistic) data on church attendance; 2) the decreasing number of priests and their ageing; and 3) disaffection among the younger generation. A good part of the Catholic hierarchy, and the two last popes, firmly believe that the rise of new movements (Comunione and Liberazione, Neocatecumenals, Charismatic Renewals and others) may correct the secularization trend and the demise of traditional territorial parishes. But encouraging these movements requires promoting a fundamental change in the cultural and organizational form of Catholicism towards a sort of never-seen ‘sectarian Church’.

Black Africans' Religious and Cultural Assimilation to, or Appropriation of, Catholicism in Italy, 1470-1520

Dans cet article, j’examine trois exemples d’africains sub-sahariens présents dans l’Italie de la Renaissance et qui ont assimilé avec succès les fondamentaux du catholicisme. On considère qu’il était impossible pour les noirs africains en Europe de se réinventer une nouvelle identité sans être préparés à apprendre comment mener une vie de catholique pieux. Toutefois, ce niveau d’assimilation était contesté régulièrement par les Européens ‘blancs’. On en examine trois exemples: le premier concerne les préjugés courants qui empêchaient qu’un couple d’esclaves noirs donne leur enfant le nom d’un saint catholique. Un deuxième exemple consiste en l’introduction d’un donateur noir dans un retable du XVe siècle. Le troisième exemple analyse le contenu religieux du testament d’une femme d’Afrique noire.

The public relevance of the church and Catholicism in Italy

This article highlights the particular situation of the Catholic religion in Italy which distinguishes itself for its systematic organization, active association-forming and cultural vitality, unrivalled in any other European country either Protestant or Catholic. On the one hand the church in Italy still disposes of such a wealth of clergy and religious figures, dioceses and parishes, educational and social institutions, ecclesiastical groups and associations, and so on, that it can maintain a diffuse presence scattered over the national territory; it deploys numerous forces and resources which form an integral part of normal social relationships that animate civil society. On the other hand, the church and Italian Catholicism today are particularly active at a cultural level, with their contribution of ideas and experience on vital questions arising in social coexistence (ranging from the family to bioethics, from religious freedom to the secular State, from national identity to the multiethnic presence, and so on).

Psychoanalysis and the Catholic Church in Italy: the role of Father Agostino Gemelli, 1925-1953.

Agostino Gemelli, a Catholic priest, psychiatrist, administrator, and educator, was an important figure in the early history of psychoanalysis in Italy. He was one of the few establishment figures to grapple with Freud's ideas in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century, a period during which Italy, compared to the rest of Europe and to the United States, was relatively impermeable to psychoanalysis. One of the factors that contributed to this was the opposition of the powerful Catholic Church, which identified in psychoanalysis a challenge to its authority. The author argues that Father Gemelli's shifting positions about psychoanalysis between 1925 and 1953 reflected the exigencies of his historical circumstances. Gemelli was able to identify in psychoanalysis an integrated view of the human condition in stark opposition to the brutal reductionism of psychiatry in Italy at that time, but also encountered in it elements intolerable to the Church. Examining specifically what it is that Gemelli could accept of psychoanalysis, and what needed to be rejected, between 1925 and 1953, illustrates the particular challenge posed by psychoanalysis to Catholicism in Italy.

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. By Michael P. Carroll (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii plus 275pp. $39.95)

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. By Michael P. Carroll (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii plus 275pp. $39.95)

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. Michael P. Carroll

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsVeiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. Michael P. Carroll Sandra L. Zimdars-SwartzSandra L. Zimdars-Swartz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 78, Number 3Jul., 1998 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/490247 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1998 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Book ReviewsVeiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. By Michael P. Carroll. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+275.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. By Michael P. Carroll. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+275.Adriano Prosperi Adriano ProsperiUniversity of Pisa Search for more articles by this author University of PisaPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 103, Number 5March 1998 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/231392 Views: 4Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy by Michael P. Carroll

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. By Michael P Carroll. (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1996. Pp. xvi, 275. $39.95.) In Veiled Threats Michael Carroll returns to the study of popular Catholicism in Italy, a project he began with Madonnas That Maim (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). In this study, however, Carroll moves well beyond his interest in Marian devotions to present a wide-ranging account of popular Catholicism in Italy since the Counter-Reformation. Carroll's work is based on an extensive reading of the secondary literature, which he combines with research in Counter-Reformation pamphlets and theological treatises, and with observations based on his own fieldwork. In his conclusion Carroll returns again to the psychoanalytic model he has employed in earlier works to explain his evidence, but the body of the text is by no means a reductive analysis, and roots his material firmly in the historical context of Counter-Reformation Italy. Carroll opens with a chapter in which he defends the concept of popular religion against critics such as Ellen Badone, William Christian, Jr., and Eamon Duffy. Carroll may overstate his differences with these scholars, however, with whom he shares a critical view toward models of religious change that emphasize the power of elites to shape the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. Official and popular Catholicism were not warring sets of beliefs, but mutually responsive systems that produced devotional forms that reflected creative adaptations satisfying to both clergy and people. Carroll's substantive chapters deal with an enormous and fascinating variety of popular devotions. He treats first of all the cults dedicated to powerful images, the most popular of which present the Madonna and the Child Jesus. Carroll reviews the attempts of the Jansenist-inspired Synod of Pistoia in 1786 to reform these cults, particularly those which involved covering images, a device that underscored the great and potentially dangerous power wielded by them. But the Synod's efforts ran aground in the face of popular resistance backed by papal support. The images themselves played a role in this dispute, when two dozen Marian statues in Rome began moving their eyes in 1796,gloating according to Carroll over their victory against Pistoia (p. 24). In the following chapters Carroll argues that such positive responses to popular beliefs were typical of the Counter-Reformation. The bishops gathered at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) were critical of images that represented false doctrines, but did not explicitly attack their invocation for supernatural assistance. In approving local image-cults bishops were motivated, according to Carroll, primarily by a desire to hold on to a popular constituency threatened by the Reformation, and by financial self-interest.The official church did introduce a more Christocentric piety to Italy, however, as Carroll demonstrates in a fascinating chapter that covers the development of processions commemorating the passion which used both living actors and statues. …

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

:Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

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