“Code of Camaldoli”: that document will then represent the ideal and political guideline of the Christian Democrats
Between holidays, hail and storms in the North, record heat especially in the South and the long shadow of the war in Ukraine, Italians have much more to think about than remembering what happened 80 years ago, in July 1943. However “There is no future without memory” he said Primo Levi. 80 years have passed since the week between 18 and 24 July 1943 when a group of intellectuals Catholics they met in the Benedictine monastery of Camaldoli putting on paper, in black and white, a programmatic document which will then go down in history as “Codex of Camaldoli”.
At the center many themes: from the family to work, from social justice to freedom, to the economy, to the relationship between citizen and state. That document will then represent the ideal and political guideline of the Christian Democrats, the party which for half a century, from 1944 to 1994, led the various governments of Italy, bringing it, not without contradictions, among the first countries in the world. Even today that document presents elements of great relevance on the ideal, social and political level. As the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella recalled: “From Camaldoli come basic guidelines, which we find today in our legal system. First of all, the affirmation of the dignity of the person and of his primacy with respect to the State – with the rejection of any absolutist conception of politics – from which derives respect for the role and responsibilities of civil society.
Moreover, on the impetus of an organic update of the Social doctrine of the Catholic Church, the function of the political community emerges as guarantor and promoter of the basic values of equality among citizens and the promotion of social justice among them. Then, with determination, the principle of peace is identified: “the baleful principle that international relations are relations of force, that force creates law…” must be abandoned. It is necessary: “the creation of a real and not fictitious or formal juridical order which subordinates or conforms the politics of the States to the higher requirement of the common life of the peoples. There is reason to be very proud, looking to the Founding Fathers of Codex of Camaldoli, for the sign they have been able to give to the future of Italian society, also in terms of freedom of conscience for every person, described, in paragraph 15, as a “need to be protected up to the extreme limit of compatibility with the common good”. In short, an anniversary to remember, celebrate and inspire to support and renew the thought of democracy today.
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