Fascism(s), War, Economic Reconstruction. Japan and Italy between the 1920s and the 1960s

29-30 June 2023

University of Turin

To the left of God. The Catholic Progressivism in the ‘long Sixty-eight’ in Italy

by Marta Margotti

(Department of Historical Studies, University of Turin)

Between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1970s, the Catholic Church in Italy also went through a prolonged phase of tensions and contrasts. In Italy, magazines, groups and communites of 'Catholic dissent' had motivations, theoretical references and language largely similar to those of other religious protest movements that emerged in Western Europe and the Americas in the same years. Compared to the religious protest that developed worldwide during the 'long Sixty-Eight', however, the Italian Catholic protest had some original characteristics, due to the specific social and political situation of the country.

The expression 'Catholic dissent' generally identifies the set of groups, communities and magazines of Christian inspiration that in Italy, after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and for at least fifteen years, repeatedly contested the ecclesiastical hierarchies and the structures of society, in the name of the Gospel and the anti-capitalist revolution. The paper focuses on progressive Catholic protest in the Italian 'long Sixty-Eight' and aims to present its origins, the main issues that motivated the choices of the different groupings and the outcomes of the intense season of unrest that contributed to changing the Church and Italian society.

Groups and magazines of 'Catholic progressivism' that emerged in the twenty years following the Second World War had few direct links with the Catholic protest of the 'long Sixty-Eight'. Only some of the ideal inheritances of the 'Catholic avant-gardes' acOve in the 1940s and 1950s were passed on to the younger generaOons of Catholicism: the differences between the protagonists of the two seasons are much more striking. In the years of the 'economic miracle', urbanisation, industrialisation, secularisation, mass schooling and the democratisation of political life had fuelled the 'great transformation' of Italy. The 'aggiornamento' (‘update’) of the Church - favoured by the Second Vatican Council (the assembly of all Catholic bishops gathered in Rome from 1962-1965) - accelerated these changes.

To interpret the spread and transformation of 'Catholic dissent' in the 'long Sixty-Eight', I propose a four-stage periodization. In the first phase, during the concluding sessions of the Second Vatican Council and in the years immediately following, the protagonists of the protest were above all groups that urged a rapid implementation of the 'aggiornamento', insisting on reforms of the instruments of religious action and on the poverty of the Church. The second phase overlapped with protests in schools, universities and factories between 1967 and 1969. Theological elaborations were often exploited to motivate the participation of believers in demonstrations and strikes and to denounce the Church's connivance with the 'power of capital'. The third phase, from the beginning of the 1970s until the referendum on the abrogation of the divorce law in 1974, saw the most intense phase of public mobilisation of the post-Council protestors. From the mid-Seventies (and this is the fourth phase), as the economic crisis worsened, the Catholic protest registered an organisational downsizing and a rethinking of its objectives.

Catholic dissent was an experience led by a few dynamic minorities. Although a minority, these groups 'took the floor' and shifted the debate to strongly divisive issues in Catholicism and Italian society. The mixture of messianic demands for religious reform and social revolution characterised the groups of Christian progressivism in Italy more than in other national contexts.

In the geographical map of the 'dissent' groups in Italy there was a greater concentration of experiences in the central and northern regions and in medium and large cities. It was mainly students and young workers, often belonging to the middle class, who partcipated in these groups, with a more sporadic presence of workers. These groups often had a decidedly elitist character, despite the declared desire to involve the 'working class'. Although more rarefied, the presence of some dissenting groups was also recorded in the small urban centers of southern Italy and in rural areas. These 'peripheral' experiences were characterised by the involvement of peasants, housewives and the elderly, with less intellectualistic forms of participation.

The minority position of the dissenting groups led to experiments with some forms of national coordination already in the late 1960s. Their dissonances made it difficult for the different 'souls' to converge around a unified programme and contributed to the end of almost all attempts at collaboration.