(A2-9) Normative Crisis and Religious Affiliation in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s

„Don Basilio“, January 1947

In the 1950s, a debate arose about the contradiction (the so-called “anomaly”) between the constitutional principle of the freedom of faith and conscience (Section 8) and the continuous privileging of the Catholic Church by way of inclusion of the 1929 Lateran Pacts into the Italian republican constitution (Section 7). Based on the analysis of this dispute, project A13 “Political Modernity and the Catholic Church in Italy’s ‘First Republic’: The Political and Cultural Controversy about the Amendment of the Concordat” focuses on the historical investigation of the reform debate about the amendment of the concordat between the Italian state and the Vatican from 1948 to 1984.

The project’s starting point is the awareness that most of the (historical) studies in the scholarly reception of and accounting for the forty-year reform process focused primarily on the institutional dimension of challenging the concordat and respectively on the parliamentary and diplomatic history of the amendment. Project A2-9 will therefore take a closer look at the meso level of society. In addition to the institutional political actors, autonomous (including Catholic) groups that take a critical attitude towards the parties and the church hierarchies will also be analysed as the protagonists of the debate were not only the activists of the Partito Radicale, the communists, the socialists and anti-clericals, but also large sections of the catholic democratic public (ACLI, CISL, FUCI and the “groups of dissent”). Their different and alternative interpretations of the system of enforcing the Catholic Church’s normative requirements, which existed until 1984, as well as their critical attitude towards the state’s independence from the Vatican will be analysed in the project.


The Project is part of interconnecting platform E Differentiation and De-Differentiation and coordinated project group Social forms of religion in ‘second modernity’.

Subproject (monograph): In between Marx and Jesus: The atypical proposal for democracy of the Italian Christian-Left

In the last years of the fascist regime, parts of the Italian Catholics came up with proposals for how they could participate directly in a future democracy. These proposals were aimed at overcoming the political marginality that had characterized the Catholics since the establishment of the Italian state. One of the most significant suggestions was made by the Vatican when advocating the forming of a united Catholic party, the Democrazia cristiana (DC), which then ruled Italy for half a century. However, there were other religiously oriented political movements that also gained political and intellectual importance within the catholic world. Those movements took a critical stance towards the polarizing positions of the Vatican/DC and the PCI, and hence participated in the debate about post-fascist Italy by handing in their own proposals for democracy and social progress. The most important one of these alternative Christian-oriented political groups was the so-called Christian Left (Sinistra cristiana).


The Project is part of interconnecting platform E Differentiation and De-Differentiation and coordinated project group Social forms of religion in ‘second modernity’.