Agreement: how the document that regulates relations between the State and the Church was born and what it says

The controversy that arose after the Vatican declarations regarding the Zan bill against discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity revolves around the so-called Concordat, the official document that regulates relations between the Italian State and the Church Catholic, updated for the last time in 1984 but dating back to 1929 and the Lateran Pacts.

It was February 11, 1929 when the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Vatican Secretary of State, for the first time put on paper the terms of relations that had not existed until then. Pope Pius XI, in those times, still considered himself a “political prisoner” of the House of Savoy which twice invaded the territories of the Church, reducing them to the city of Rome alone. Mussolini, despite the internal pressures of the fascist party, decided not to get into a head-on confrontation with those who (the Church in fact) influenced millions of Italians. The negotiations lasted about 2 years and resulted in the Lateran Pacts, so called from the palace of San Giovanni in Laterano in which they were signed, which established mutual recognition between the Kingdom of Italy and the Vatican State.

1 Patti lateranensi were composed of two distinct documents: the Treaty, which recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Holy See and founded the Vatican City State and the Concordat, which defined civil and religious relations in Italy between Church and Government and recognized the Catholic one as a state religion. Then there was a Financial Convention that regulated the economic issues that arose after the spoliation of ecclesiastical bodies. The formalization of the reports was sanctioned by the visit, on July 13, 1929, of King Vittorio Emanuele III to the Vatican and by that, on December 28 of ten years later, by Pope Pius XIII to Italy.

In 1947 the Lateran Pacts were introduced into the Constitution of the Republic with a majority vote of the Constituent Assembly in which, in addition to the votes of the Christian Democrats of Alcide De Gasperi, also those of the Communist Party by decision of the leader Palmiro Togliatti. Article 7 of the Constitution provided that any modification, provided it was “accepted by both parties”, did not require a constitutional revision procedure. And it was precisely on the basis of that article that in 1984 the government of Bettino Craxi, in agreement with the Church, decided on the changes still in force today.

In 1984, after a long work behind the scenes by Giulio Andreotti, to sign the revision were the premier and the secretary of state of the Vatican, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. The new text (which summarized the previous 45 articles in just 14) eliminated any reference to the Catholic religion as the state religion, but at the same time sanctioned the freedom of choice on the teaching of the Catholic religion and provided for recognition and spaces, including economic ones, for the Church, paving the way for the subsequent agreement for the financing of the clergy through the 8 per thousand on Irpef. This last matter constituted the gateway for the entry on the scene of a new actor, hitherto unrelated: the Italian Episcopal Conference (the CEI) with which the State from then on would have dealt with every aspect of that and other issues.

Another important point of the revision concerned marriages, which in the Lateran Pacts were recognized as “a sacrament of indissoluble value”. The new Concordat limited itself to recognizing the civil effects of Catholic marriage, which in order to cease no longer needed a “sentence of nullity” from the Church. The civil service was then introduced as a possible replacement for the military conscription service for religious and deacons, the confirmation of the respect by the judiciary of the secret learned from the priest in Confession and of the sentences of matrimonial nullity issued by the Court of the Roman Sacred Rota. Chaplains were then set up for the armed forces and prisons.

The second article of the Concordat is the one quoted by the Vatican regarding the Zan Bill. It reads verbatim: “The Church has full freedom to carry out her pastoral, educational and charitable mission, of evangelization and sanctification. In particular, the Church is guaranteed the freedom of organization, public exercise of worship, the exercise of the magisterium and the spiritual ministry as well as jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters “. The agreement also guarantees “to Catholics and their associations and organizations the full freedom of assembly and expression of thought by word, writing and any other means of dissemination”. For this reason, the Church today argues that any conservative positions of priests or members of the Vatican can be prosecuted as a crime if the Bill comes into force.