Italy: repeated interventions by the Church with the Italian State

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was invited on November 16, to present to parliament The Compendium of the Social doctrine of the Church. The cardinal told the Italian deputies that a “political regime which was genuinely secular must accept that Christians would act as such in society, without hiding themselves, and that the Church would manifest her own position on important current ethical questions.” “A true democracy has need of a soul,” he said.

 In view of the electoral campaign for the legislative elections next spring, certain political parties have requested the revision and even the abolition of the concordat signed in 1929 between the Holy See and Italy, and modified in 1984. During the General Assembly of the Italian bishops at Assisi, Mgr. Giuseppe Betori, Secretary General of the Italian Bishops Conference, recalled on November 15 that “the Church does not feel the necessity for any discussion on the concordat.” Because “neither the political powers, unless in a minor way, nor cultural forces, nor the general feeling in the populace, feel the need to open the debate on the reform of the concordat and even less on its abolition.”

Cardinal Camillo Ruini warned the centre-left that no attempt whatsoever to pass laws authorizing marriage between homosexuals or expanding the right to abortion would be accepted by the Catholic Church.