Freedom of Religion in Italy - History

History

Article 1 of the Albertine Statute identified Roman Catholicism as the single religion of state but declared that other existing confessions were tolerated in conformance with the laws. This declaration led rapidly to the opening of the ghettoes and the emancipation of the Waldensians. Toleration was limited however: Article 28, while declaring that there should be a free press, stated specifically that Bibles, catechisms, liturgies and prayer books could not be printed without episcopal permission; religious propaganda was also prohibited by the state. Nevertheless, in the years leading up to the unification of Italy the Kingdom of Sardinia was more tolerant than other states on the peninsula: in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany the practice of religions other than Catholicism was punishable by imprisonment or exile.

The Kingdom of Italy inherited in effect the Piedmontese-Sardinian constitution and on 18 March 1871 a major advance in religious freedom in the country was made by an order of the day introduced by the liberal reformist Pasquale Stanislao Mancini which established that all religions should be treated equally.

The Fascist period was marked by the Concordat between the state and the Catholic Church, known as the Lateran treaty of 1929. Other Christian denominations and other religions, however, faced renewed repression. In 1935 the Pentecostals were declared prejudicial to the integrity of the race. Salvationists and Jehova’s Witnesses, as well as the Pentecostals were liable to imprisonment or exile while other minority Christian groups faced notable restrictions. Although antisemitism was not embedded in Italian Fascism from the start, in the Nazi manner, repression of Italian Jews became severe in the 1930s with the enactment of the Italian Racial Laws. In the latter stages of the Second World War, in particular during the period of the Italian Social Republic and German occupation of much of the peninsula, many Jews were deported to the Nazi death camps.

The 1947 Constitution of the Italian Republic enshrined religious freedoms in passages including the following:

All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of, religion (Article 3)

All religious confessions are equally free before the law. (Article 8)

All have the right to profess freely their own religious faith in whatever form, provided that the rites are not contrary to morality. (Article 19)

Various laws enacted during the Fascist period remained in force, however, and a number of trials took place involving Pentecostals and Jehova’s Witnesses. This changed in 1955 with the advent of the Constitutional Court which abolished or modified legislation on relevant matters which it found inconsistent with the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.

In 1984, following a revised accord with the Vatican, Catholicism lost its status as the official religion of the Italian state.

Controversy however remains, particularly abroad, over certain Fascist-era laws that are still in force and that have not been declared unconstitutional. In 2009 the European Court of Human Rights, in a case brought by an Italian mother who wanted her children to have a secular education, ruled against the display of crucifixes in the classrooms of Italian state schools. It found that ‘The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by the public authorities… restricted the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions’ and that it restricted the ‘right of children to believe or not to believe’. This ruling was in marked contrast with the position of the Italian courts that had ruled in 2005 that crucifixes were allowed to be present in polling stations and, in 2006, that display of crucifixes in state schools was allowed on the basis that the crucifix symbolised core Italian social values.