Alberta Giorgi

Ahab and the white whale: the contemporary debate around the forms of Catholic political commitment in Italy

For more than the half of its republican history, the Italian political landscape was dominated by the Christian Democrats – a religiously inspired conservative political party. After its collapse, the possibility of creating a new (or renewed) Catholic party has been widely debated. This contribution focuses on how different areas of Italian Catholicism present the issue of a possible unified Catholic political commitment: what is in their opinion the unifying criterion and what shape the Catholics’ political commitment should take. Data are based on the analysis of articles from Catholic magazines and daily newspapers in the period between September 2008 and spring 2012, thus including the Monti cabinet (November 2011–February 2013).

Communion and Liberation: a Catholic movement in a multilevel governance perspective

In this article we focus on how changes in political structure influence religion. Communion and Liberation (CL) is widely known in Italy as a very important Catholic movement whose political power has been significantly increasing in the last 15 years. It is an example of a movement deeply rooted at the local level, where its activities range from grassroots meetings to business activities and service provision. In the sociological literature, CL has been studied either by focusing on its political ideology, or as a religious movement. Introducing a specific focus on the political system allows us to highlight the close relationships between the recent changes in the Italian political system and the reasons for the local success of CL. Indeed, it has been a process of mutual adaptation and influence. The political success of a Catholic movement in a Western democracy is relevant to understanding the changing role of religion in the political arena. Christian movements can play a role of substitution for traditional political movements in countries where traditional parties have become particularly weak and not capable of inspiring enthusiasm among citizens. But the story of CL in Lombardy suggests also that something is changing in the relationship between national and local politics. CL is able to play on different territorial horizons by using local, regional and national political spheres to promote its policies, mainly in the welfare sector. This is an important signal of a capacity both to adapt to a changing political system and to influence these changes. In this paper we focus on the relationships between CL and Italian politics in the Second Republic (1993 to the present day) by analysing CL representation of its political role as well as by pointing out the political opportunity structure in which its success has taken place.

The Debate on the Crucifix in Public Spaces in Twenty-First Century Italy

Although the presence of the crucifix in public classrooms and other public offices is an ancient Italian tradition, it was never a political issue until recent times. In the early 2000s, some court cases and other events (first at the national and later also at the European level) turned the public display of the crucifix into a major issue in the national political debate. This article analyses the frames used by social and political actors in the different phases of this debate, in order to understand its evolution and its connection to the broader discussion on values in the public sphere developed in Italy in recent times.

Religion and local politics in Southern Europe: a research agenda

ABSTRACT This article brings to a conclusion the series of three special sections published in 2015 and 2016 by Religion, State and Society on ‘Religion and local politics in southern Europe’. We set up a research agenda on the interactions between religion and local politics in Southern Europe. In doing so, we focus on the localisation of religion, including religious debates, and on the impact of the recent economic crisis. More specifically, we address the local as a contested concept, the multilevel governance of religion as a scalar opportunity structure – in relation to the transnational dimension of religious actors – the effects of such changes in the welfare landscape and the impact of the economic crisis on the activities and strategies of religious actors in Southern Europe. Our research agenda focuses on the interactions between two main dimensions: the territorial impact of political and economic changes, and the multiscalar schemes of territorial governance.

Second special section on religion and territorial politics in southern Europe

ABSTRACT The three articles included in this second special section devoted to the interactions between religion and territorial politics in southern Europe continue the underlying research questions about the multiscalar interactions between religious mobilisation and policymaking, focusing on different denominations and scales of observations. The three articles point out three relevant elements for the analysis of religion and local politics. First, they show how contextualised exogenous factors influence the structures of opportunities for religions in the public and the political spheres. Second, they inchoately reveal the weakness of simplistic readings of the secularisation thesis. Third, they evidence the importance of a local and localised approach in analysing the relationships between religion and politics.

Special section: religion and territorial politics in southern Europe

With this issue of Religion, State & Society, we inaugurate a planned series of special sections focusing on the analysis of the political involvement of religious associations and organisations at the local level. Without pre-empting the more substantial conclusion that we plan for the last of the special sections, in this short introduction we aim to state briefly the main issues that will be covered by the selected articles. The relationship between religion and politics is a topic usually analysed either from a national or from an international perspective. Nevertheless, changes in contemporary political systems, in Europe and abroad, have reshaped the hierarchies between the local and the national spheres on a number of policies and issues. This has particularly been the case in Southern Europe where, over the last three decades, most of the countries have had to face several changes. First, religious change, which is the ongoing process of social secularisation, irrespective of denomination. Second, economic change, as a result of the major economic crisis in 2008. Third, political change: the burgeoning of new social movements and parties challenging the established party systems. We believe that national and transnational perspectives are useful, but insufficient to address properly the transformation of the interactions between religion and politics that have been induced by those changes. In religious matters, if the national state–church models still play an essential role in defining the regulatory framework for religions, we believe that observing the less visible interactions between politics and religion at the local scale is very necessary, for four main reasons. First, it helps us to better understand the debates generated by the implementation of the national norms, but also to focus again on the public debates and controversies that have frequently anticipated the national debates and processes of institutionalisation. This is the case, for example, with controversies around the location of worship places, which have often triggered broader debates over the role of religion in national – and even European – identities. Politicised controversies on symbolic issues often take place at the local level: see the debates over the location of mosques in Italy (Allievi 2009; Bombardieri 2011; Conti 2012; O’Miel and Talpin 2013; Triandafyllidou 2006), the controversies surrounding the Muslim headdress in Spain (Burchardt, Griera, and García-Romeral 2014) and in Europe (Amiraux 2013; Ferrari and Pastorelli 2013; Koussens and Roy 2014) and, more broadly, issues dealing with religion in public spaces. Second, the process of Europeanisation has resulted in the rescaling of government tasks, and contributed to the pluralisation of both the actors and the legal regimes able to