Religion In Italy Research Articles

The Regulation of Religion through National Normative Frameworks: A Comparative Analysis between Italy and Argentina

The normative framework is one of the constitutive edges of state regulation of religion. It contributes to the configuration of different forms of relations between state and religions. This can be observed in at least three areas. First, in the way the state defines religion. Second, in the way it recognises and legislates its relationship with different religions. Finally, in the rules it establishes for confessional institutions and actors at different levels of social life (education, health, prisons, etc.). In this article, we propose to comparatively analyse the national legal systems that regulate religion in Italy and Argentina, with special emphasis on the equal or differentiated treatment of different religions. The policies of recognition and integration of religious minorities find in the normative framework an empowering or limiting factor, depending on the national context. Although both countries share a dominant Catholic matrix, their historical developments and legal formats present contrasts that project different scenarios of religious governance, which we will try to elucidate.

Uncertain faith: A multi-method approach

More than 25 years after the previous survey, the state of religion in Italy in 2017 was surveyed. This time a more challenging mixed methodology was used following both quantitative (with 3238 questionnaires administered according to criteria of statistical representativeness) and qualitative (with 164 in-depth interviews, in various Italian locations) criteria. For over half a century, there has been talk of secularization and the end of religion. What is being recorded all this time, actually, is a decline in religious practice. Meanwhile, there has been an expansion of a kind of religious area that goes beyond Church membership. There is also talk of uncertain faith meaning that a troubled and reflexive kind of belief continues to exist. At present, a new conceptual category is emerging more and more, that of Church as religion, meaning that the Church itself has become religion and begun to replace the content of faith.

The Lautsi Legacy: A New Judgment on the Crucifix in Classrooms and the Multiculturalist Turn on Freedom of/from Religion in Italy

The article offers a socio-legal analysis of the recent case on freedom of/from religion in Italy, the Coppoli judgment of the Italian Supreme Court, which grants public schools the autonomy to manage religious symbols. The new ruling is discussed in the shadow of the Lautsi case, examining the shift from the discourse of “passive religious symbol” to the framework of “respect of different sensibilities” in pluralistic classrooms. In doing that, first, we provide a sociological framework for the study of “passive religious symbols” from a multiculturalist and religious freedom perspective. Second, the Coppoli case is contextualized within political, normative and judicial Italian contexts following the Lautsi jurisprudence. Third, we revise the model of “secularism as a method of dialogue” considered by the judges as important in claiming individual freedoms of/from religion in the multicultural classroom. The final part of the article provides a discussion and critical considerations about the Coppoli case, problematizing the future challenges of managing religious diversity in Italian public schools. We argue that the dynamic of freedom of/from religion’s jurisprudence in the Coppoli case endorses an additive model of accommodating diverse cultural and religious identities in public schools.

Rethinking the Age of Emancipation: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany, 1800–1918, ed. Martin Baumeister, Philipp Lenhard and Ruth Nattermann

Martin Baumeister, Philipp Lenhard and Ruth Nattermann’s edited collection offers a new perspective on the age of emancipation that incorporates both gender and Jewish history. These dual emancipations work nicely together not only as a result of the notable involvement in feminist activism of middle-class Jewish women but also because their juxtaposition highlights the competing themes of inclusion and exclusion that permeated the era. The chapters focus primarily on Italy and Germany, where Jewish emancipation accompanied later nation-building, but move beyond a purely dualistic or comparative focus to include events in the Habsburg Empire, France and North Africa. The volume is comprised of nineteen chapters divided into seven sections. However, one can simplify the organisation into three major segments: introduction and methodology, the long nineteenth century, and the First World War. In the first section, Ilaria Porciani provides an overview of the connections between family and nation in the patriotic...

Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue

Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue

Introduction to Law and the Christian Tradition in Italy: The Legacy of the Great Jurists

Firmly rooted on Roman and Canon law, Italian legal culture, from the Middle Ages to our day, has had an impressive influence on the civil law tradition, and it is rightly regarded as “the cradle of the European legal culture.” Along with the Justinian’s compilation, the US Constitution, and the French Civil Code, the Decretum of Master Gratian or the so-called Glossa ordinaria of Accursius are one of the few legal sources that have influenced the entire world for centuries. This volume explores a millennium-long story of interaction between law and religion in Italy through a series of 26 biographical chapters. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars and historians from Italy and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law in the era of globalization.

Quality of religion in Italy. A multi-methods approach

Quality of religion in Italy. A multi-methods approach

Immigration and Multiculturalism in Italy: The Religious Experience of the Peruvian Community in the Eternal City

The present study on the religious experience of the Peruvian community in Rome belongs to the area of studies on immigration, multiculturalism, and religion in Italy. In this article, I analyze the devotion of the Peruvian community in Rome to “the Lord of Miracles”. This pious tradition, which venerates the image of Christ crucified—painted by an Angolan slave—began in 1651 in Lima, during the Viceroyalty of Peru. Today, the sacred image is venerated in countries all over the world that host Peruvian immigrant communities that have set up branches of the Confraternity of the Lord of Miracles. I examine, in particular, the cult of el Señor de los Milagros in Rome in terms of Peruvian popular religiosity and national identity experienced within a transnational context. This essay serves two purposes: The first is to analyze the significance that this religious experience acquires in a foreign environment while maintaining links with its country of origin and its cultural traditions in a multilocal environment. The second aim is to examine the integration of the Peruvian community into Italian society, beginning with religious practice, in this case Roman Catholicism. This kind of religiosity seems not only to favor the encounter between the two cultures but also to render Italian Roman Catholicism multicultural.

Regulating Religion in Italy

This article focuses on state-church relations and on the peculiar implementation of the “idea of secularism” in Italy. First, it explores the formal provisions of the 1848 Constitution. Next, it investigates constitutional provisions that came into force in 1948. Finally, it examines how the actors of the living constitution (legislators, the government, judges, and the Constitutional Court in particular) tried to balance and develop the potentially conflicting principles included in the 1948 Constitution in the area of religious freedom, equality, and state-church relations. The article explores three particularly controversial examples: the teaching of religion in state schools; the display of the crucifix in classrooms; and state funding mechanisms of religious denominations. The main claim of the article is that, with regard to the regulation of religion in Italy, the transformation of the constitutional position of religion did not occur within the formal constitution, but in the “living constitution.”

Empirical report of research on religious education in Italian Catholic schools (2017)

The fourth national survey on the teaching of the Catholic religion in Italy (2015–16) was not limited to state schools, but as in the previous (2004–05) also involved Catholic equivalent schools. This study will focus on the results of the latter, even if the data will be examined in relation to the state subsystem. In summary, it can be said that in Italy the situation of the teaching of the Catholic religion is overall good, although the best trends are observed in the state school compared to the Catholic one that, however, has an undoubted improvement over time.

Gare à l’écart ! De l’importance du genre dans la religion, la spiritualité et la laïcité en Italie

This article has a twofold aim. The first is to examine relations between women and religion in Italy in order to discover whether women contribute to the process of Italian secularisation as described in the literature. The second is to explore relations between secularisation and secularism among Italian women. Our main theme is that the women’s loosening relationship with the Catholic Church has been accompanied by their greater flexibility on moral and ethical questions. Since these questions have frequently been the object of intervention by the Catholic hierarchy, they are a valuable lens through which to examine secularism, revealing how far Italian women have distanced themselves from the Church’s mandates. With this end in view, we shall focus on Italian women’s opinions about topics (such as abortion, divorce, sexuality and reproductive rights) relating to “morality-politics” which are intrinsic to the “emancipation of women from the domestic sphere”.

IDEALISMO À ITALIANA: FILOSOFIA NA ITÁLIA E INFLUÊNCIA GERMÂNICA NOS SÉCULOS XIX E XX: O CASO DA INFLUÊNCIA E RECEPÇÃO DE FEUERBACH, KIERKEGAARD E NIETZSCHE NAS FILOSOFIAS DE BENEDETTO CROCE E GIOVANNI GENTILE

O objetivo do presente trabalho é investigar o panorama da filosofia italiana dos séculos XIX e XX e a respectiva influência germânica por ela sofrida, avaliando ainda a articulação do idealismo italiano e a crítica ao cristianismo produzida na Itália nesse período. Para tanto, dividiremos nosso artigo em duas partes principais: na primeira, investigaremos o idealismo italiano e a crítica à religião na Itália entre os séculos XIX e XX, dando especial ênfase a dois dos seus principais autores: Benedetto Croce e Giovanni Gentile. Já na segunda parte, investigaremos a influência de três pensadores do idealismo germânico na Itália desse período, a saber, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard e Nietzsche, bem com a sua recepção em contexto italiano e sua importância para o idealismo local.

Procession as a Literary Motif: The Intersection of Religious and National Symbolism in Italian Narrative (Nineteenth–Twentieth Centuries)

National imagery developed as a secular substitute for religion, and in modern society, there has been a ‘transfer’ of sacredness from religion to politics. This paper focuses on Italy, where, despite the legal separation of church and state, the ‘sacral’ national apparatus still owes a considerable debt to religion. After a short exposition of some of the main theories of civil religion in Italy, this work will analyze a corpus of Italian novels set during the Risorgimento, a period that functions in Italian culture as an atypical founding myth. It will show in particular how civil and religious symbols and rituals intersect in the literary representation of processions. Indeed, the procession is a recurring motif in Italian narrative and presents peculiar aesthetic features. The analysis of this literary motif will take advantage of socio-anthropological theories and will trace a distinction between ordered and disordered, or enthusiastic, processions.

Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities eds. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore

Reviewed by: Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities eds. by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore Kathleen Olive Terpstra, Nicholas, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore, eds, Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (Europa Sacra, 6), Turnhout, Brepols, 2013; hardback; pp. x, 396; 12 b/w illustrations, 11 b/w line art; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503538938. The essays in this collection explore early modern confraternal activities and lay life. A number come out of an Italian-focused conference, ‘Brotherhood and Boundaries—Fraternità e barriere’, that was held at Pisa in September 2008, but the geographical reach of this edited volume is somewhat broader. Nicholas Terpstra’s Introduction sets the volume’s parameters as an interrogation of the ownership of religious space: confraternities, as spaces in which the laity and clergy both staked claims, were often sites where such ownership was negotiated. Part I of the volume investigates charity and civic religion in Italy: Daniel Bornstein presents a case study of Cortona’s Misericordia confraternity (a space, after 1411, for challenging Florence), while Anna Esposito looks at the metropolitan focus of Rome’s confraternities on needy foreign visitors. Carlo Taviani argues that Genoese confraternities offered alternatives to family-based factionalism and encouraged communalism; Cristina Cecchinelli contributes a particularly elegant paper on Marian groups in Parma, and their integration into the papal state made possible through links with organisations in Rome. Part II looks at Florence, from Sabrina Corbellini’s fascinating study of gospel harmonies and other vernacular biblical texts in confraternal translation and use, to lay preachers’ confraternal educations in Peter Howard’s study of [End Page 248] Pietro Bernardo. Olga Zorzi Pugliese investigates sermons of a different sort: Machiavelli’s ‘Exhortation to Penance’ and his parodical Rules for a Company of Pleasure. Part III moves outside Italy. Maarten F. Van Dijck contributes a statistical analysis of the social capital of kinship groups in Aarschot, near Antwerp, while Juan O. Mesquida presents a history of Manila’s Misericordia confraternity. Part IV extends the brotherhood metaphor to Islam and Judaism. The essays by Alexandre Papas and Roni Weinstein in this section both stress the importance of mysticism to these contexts but their integration into the otherwise Catholic contexts of the volume (Protestant brotherhoods are not examined) raises as many questions as it explores. Part V surveys race and gender in the confraternity: Federica Francesconi’s paper on Soed Holim, a charitable society organised by Jewish women in Modena’s ghetto, and Susan Verdi Webster’s investigation of native confraternities in Quito—which, she argues, could function as both ‘ethnic leveller’ and ‘ethnic refuge’—are strong contributions. Part VI looks at sites of conflict between laypeople and clergy. Gavin Hammel compares responses to discipline confraternities in thirteenth-century Bologna and fourteenth-century Tournai, finding that differing class habitus (to borrow from Bourdieu) accounts for some clerical opposition in Tournai. Danilo Zardin deconstructs the truism that post-Tridentine confraternities became more clerical and disciplined in his survey of Genoa, Venice, Milan, and Como, and David Garrioch’s study of confraternities in eighteenth-century Paris and Milan explores contentious zones, from space and money, to clerical involvement and heresy. Many of the contributions in this volume are close, convincingly argued interpretations of archival material. As a collection, they lay groundwork that will be of interest to researchers of confraternal studies and lay devotion more generally. Kathleen Olive The University of Sydney Copyright © 2016 Kathleen Olive

Regulating Religion in Italy: The Constitution Does (Not) Matter

Regulating religion in Italy has always been a crucial issue, starting from the outset of the national history. It is not necessary to have a deep knowledge of the history of the Italian state to be aware of this exceptionalism: geography is telling enough. The Italian state – a relatively weak state that always had to deal with a strong religion – is the only example of a state that contains another independent ecclesiastical (or sacerdotal-monarchical) state entity in the middle of its territory. In this paper, I focus on a specific aspect of this “constitutional” exceptionalism. I particularly focus on state-Church relations and on the peculiar implementation of the “idea of secularism” in Italy. The paper shows that the constitutional regulation of religion does not tell so much about the regulation of religion in the Italian constitutional experience. This is not due to a lack of constitutional provisions regulating religion and religious freedom. On the contrary, both the pre-republican constitutional charter and the republican Constitution accorded a very prominent role to the regulation of the religious phenomenon. Nonetheless, I will show that an investigation of the “living constitution” reveals that constitutional provisions have been implemented in diverging directions throughout the history of Italian secularism. To this end, in this paper I firstly provide an outline of the formal constitutional provisions of the 1848 Constitution followed by a brief overview of legislative and jurisdictional developments of the 19th and of the first half of the 20th century. Secondly, I address the constitutional provisions adopted in 1947, focusing on the constitutional “compromise” reached by the Constituent Assembly. Thirdly, I investigate briefly how the actors under the living constitution (the legislator, the government, common judges and the constitutional court in particular) tried to balance and develop the potentially conflicting principles included in the 1947 Constitution in the field of religious freedom, equality and state-Church relations. In particular, I focus on three particularly controversial examples: the teaching of religion in state schools; the display of the crucifix in classrooms and mechanisms for state funding of religious denominations. Finally, I argue that insofar as the regulation of religion in Italy is concerned, the actual shift in paradigm did not occur within the formal Constitution, but rather in the living Constitution.

Young immigrants and religion in Italy. New identities, old stereotypes, an educational challenge

Migration and multiculturalism are key factors of social change in Italy. The increased number of adolescents and young people belonging to the second generation of immigrants is one of the most important issues. In the context of a globalised, complex and fluid society, the presence of second generation migrants, most of whom were born in Italy, has accelerated the crisis in the concept of Italian identity – understood to be traditionally formed from the unity of religion, language, race and territorial belonging. Religion is part of young immigrants’ cultures, values and ways of life. Generally more secularized than their parents, sometimes attracted to extremisms, boys and girls have to negotiate their different religious attitudes in the private and social contexts. At the same time, and particularly for Muslims, they have to face the effects of stereotypes, prejudices and discriminations. Given this scenario, educational agencies are called to play a leading role to disseminate knowledge on the many religions, to deconstruct prejudices and to promote dialogue and inter-religious activism.

Religion and the city: A review on Muslim spatiality in Italian cities

This paper focuses on the spatial impacts and characteristics of the Muslim presence in Italy. The centrality of religion for many migrants has significant consequences on the morphology of the Italian cities. This is especially the case of Islam, which is now the second most important religion in Italy – and the prevalent religion among immigrants.After examining facts and figures about the Muslim presence in Italy, the paper focuses on two aspects of the Muslim urban presence. First, it analyses the residential patterns of Muslims, with reference to the case of Milan. The tendency towards a sprawled pattern is highlighted. The paper then analyses the four main ‘landmarks’ of the urban presence of Muslims in Italy: places of worship, halal butcheries, burial-places, and forms of public life. A discussion of the evolutionary prospects of Muslim spatiality in Italian cities over the next few decades follows these analyses.

A Bronze Hellenistic Dwarf in the Metropolitan Museum

A Bronze Hellenistic Dwarf in the Metropolitan Museum

The Legal Status of the Church of England in Italy

In a historic move, the Church of England has achieved legal recognition in Italy. Legal status was declared by a presidential decree signed by the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, in July 2014. This recognises the Church of England as a denomination and a ‘properly organised and authorised’ religion in Italy. The decree gives legal status to the association Chiesa d'Inghilterra (Church of England), which represents the Church of England in Italy, and accepts its statutes. The registered address of the Chiesa d'Inghilterra is in the centre of Rome.

L’Italia: un modello concordatario nell’epoca del pluralismo

The relationship between the Catholic Church and state in Italy is a long journey that has marked the history of the country.Also according to this history today in the Italy Catholic Church continues to enjoy a public role.In the age of pluralism and secularization as it is possible to combine the Italian prominent role of the Catholic Church with a modern democracy and a state called to be secular and neutral in the religious field?Briefly we retrace the history of the relationship between state and religion in Italy since the unification national to the present day. In parallel, we will examine the main mode of relationship between state and religions in Europe to better contextualize the Italian case and to verify or refute the recurring idea of his alleged exceptionality. Finally, through a reconstruction of some illustrative cases and legal analysis of survey data, we will evaluate the health status of the current system of church-state relations.