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A Pause of the Catholic Liberal Dream?

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A Pause of the Catholic Liberal Dream? religions Article 1967/1969: The End, or (Just) a Pause of the Catholic Liberal Dream? Luca Diotallevi Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione, Università Roma TRE, 00154 Roma, Italy; [email protected] Received: 9 September 2020; Accepted: 11 November 2020; Published: 20 November 2020 Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore the strong connections between the topics of this special volume of Religions: the current crisis of political Catholicism and religious Catholicism; the new questions posed about the relationship between Catholicism and advanced modernization; the relationship between Catholicism and European institutions; and the importance of the North Atlantic relationships within Catholicism. The paper sheds light on these questions through an analysis of a particular but indicative case study, namely, the “Catholic 68” in Italy. Deconstructing the predominant narrative about the relationship between Vatican II and the events of 1968 (or, better, those of the 2-year period 1967–1969) helps to clarify the connections between the topics of this volume in important ways. In fact, the predominant narrative about the “Catholic 68” still pays undue tribute to both an oversimplified reconstruction of the “parties” who fought one another during the Second Vatican Council and an oversimplified reading of the late 1960s. In this perspective, the Italian case is particularly relevant and yields important sociological insight. The starting point of the paper is the abundant literature on the “long 60s”. This scholarship has clarified the presence of an important religious dimension to the social and cultural processes of this period as well as a (generally accepted) link between the Council-issued renewal and “1968”. At the same time that literature has also clarified that the “long 60s” paved the way for a deep social transition which has also marked the first two decades of the 21st century. The nature of this religious renewal and social change has often been described as the triumph of liberal parties over conservative parties. This paper instead proposes a “three parties scheme” (conservative, progressive and liberal) to better understand the confrontation that occurred at the Council and that at the end of the same decade and its consequences for Catholicism and European politics today. Keywords: Catholicism; political Catholicism; Europe; Vatican II Council; modernization; religion/politics relationship 1. Introduction Catholicism is in crisis today, and not only in Central-Western Europe. Italy—which this paper will focus on—does not represent an exception (Vezzoni and Biolcati-Rinaldi 2015). Italian Catholicism is in crisis from the point of view of both its religious system and political system1. Such a double crisis represents the deep difficulties faced by the current Catholic orientation 1 In order to consider Catholicism as a phenomenon which is not limited to the religious dimension alone see Diotallevi 2017. From an historic point of view it is easy to understand how general, serious and deep the crisis of Catholicism is, especially when keeping in mind the close links between Italian political Catholicism and Italian religious Catholicism during the entire 20th century (De Rosa 1976a, 1976b; Scoppola 1966). From an analytical perspective, it is not helpful to confuse these two crises (that of the political Catholicism and that of the religious Catholicism), just as it would be to consider them as isolated from each other. Religions 2020, 11, 623; doi:10.3390/rel11110623 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2020, 11, 623 2 of 25 towards modernity. Moreover, this orientation also includes a certain view of Catholicism’s relationship with itself. This double (religious and political) and twofold (objective and reflexive) crisis of contemporary Catholicism describes the deep crisis that the vision and the program of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1962–1965) are experiencing today. One example helps to illustrate the depth of this crisis. Could there be anything more divergent from what the Council established with regards to its positive declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis humanae2, than the current positions of the French, Italian, Polish or Hungarian “Catholic sovereignists”? Dignitatis humanae (nn.6-7, and, more extensively, John Paul II’s Centenisimus annus) declares an idea of the common good as something that a plurality of social institutions (political, religious, economic, scientific, family and so on) must take care of and deal with together, and, in doing so—each in its own way—those institutions limit each other in order to guarantee individual freedom. Contemporary “Catholic sovereignists”, instead, reduce the idea of the common good to an exclusively political affair, and the ‘sovereign state’ as the particular form that politics must consequently take. These “sovereignists” pursue something (‘sovereignty’) that Dignitatis humanae firmly condemns, and to this purpose they also make an unscrupulous use of religious symbols and myths (Diotallevi 2020). What is more, these “sovereignists” are also fighting against the same principles of religious freedom that Dignitatis humanae presents as something the Church and Catholics have to fight for. This paper will try to deal with this current crisis of Catholicism by analyzing two elements. (i) First, it revisits the 1967–1969 crisis in Italy and its relationship with Vatican II in order to better understand the contemporary crisis of the relationship between Catholicism and modernity. (ii) In order to understand the relationships between the religious and political forces unleashed by Vatican II and the 1967–1969 crises, the paper then reconsiders the results of Vatican II and the reforms it implemented. In the interpretation of this article, these results and reforms appear as the triumph of a distinct, liberal (Anglo–Saxon-influenced) Catholic understanding of modernity. That understanding positively and critically embraced modernity, and in ways that were fundamentally different from the “conservative” Catholic understanding of modernity. It was also deeply different from the “progressive” understanding of modernity, whose theoretical roots are more often closer to those of conservative as opposed to liberal Catholicism. According to this perspective, the results of Vatican II did not represent a compromise between progressive and conservative Bishops, but an anticonservative alliance led by a liberal minority which included progressive forces as a junior (even if numerically bigger) partner. As recognized by a large amount of literature, the events of the 2-year period from 1967–1969 represent the first severe crisis of the post-Council phase. Quoting Gerd-Rainer Horn(2015a, p. 51): “the huge involvement of Christians as Christians in the different progressive movements developed between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s is largely undisputed. In this regard, the only serious and important question is whether this wave of contestation was a direct or an indirect consequence of Vatican II” (see also Walsh 2006). An analysis of the Italian case helps us to shed light on this point, but it also helps us to deal with an anomaly in the scholarship. Despite the privileged role that the Italian case plays in the eyes of researchers studying the relationship between Catholicism and “1968” (the Holy See is in Italy, the Council was held here, the relevance for universal Catholicism of the relationship between the Vatican and its closest political and social context should not be forgotten), the amount of studies and debates about the relationship between “1968” and Catholicism in Italy is not even remotely similar to the amount of work and results available for the United States (a truly endless literature), Québec (e.g., Gavreau 2013; Lemieux 2000), Great Britain (e.g., Field 2014, 2017), Ireland (e.g., Woodcook Tentler 2007), France (e.g., Hervieu-Leger 1989, 2003; Cuchet 2018; Le Goff 2018), Netherlands (e.g., Coleman 1978; Van Dam 2015), Belgium (e.g., Dobbelaere 1987) or Germany 2 About the paradigmatic value of this document see Ratzinger-Benedict XVI’s speech to the Roman Curia of 22 December 2005. Religions 2020, 11, 623 3 of 25 (e.g., Lepp et al. 2016). On the other hand, this does not deprive, but instead increases, the value and interest of works by authors such as Beretta(1998, 2008), G. Formigoni(2012), F. Gentiloni(2018), Santagata(2016), Saresella(2005, 2017), Vecchio and others. The present paper is divided into five parts: (1) The first part offers a critique of the main interpretations of the relationship between “1968” and Vatican II. This attempt will be developed (2) first by trying to recall the meaning of “1968” according to the more general interpretation of the long 60s and then (3) by doing something similar for Vatican II. On the basis of all this, we will try to demonstrate that, in the 2-year period of 1967–1969, numerous orientations regarding the relationship between Catholicism and society emerged, and that these orientations can be better understood if put in relationship with the events of Vatican II (which ended in 1965). This includes both the first stage of application and reception of the Council’s resolutions but also the Catholic criticism about modernity and modernization that already during the 1950s had both a rightist and a leftist declination. The later was destined to become a protagonist of the “68” and celebrated by its myth. Finally (4) we will highlight some analytical advantages that the revision of the relationships between Vatican II and “1968” brings to those interested in the current crisis of Catholicism and in its connection with the political events of Europe and North Atlantic relationships. Part 5 is devoted to some conclusions. If “1968” and its story did not express, but rather humiliated and defeated, the reformism inspired by the Council, then the late 1960s crisis of Catholicism in Italy (and not only) appears under another light. The revenge of the antireformists against Vatican II would appear to have begun not only during last decades from the conservative forces of the “right”, but well before and from progressive forces of the “left” as well.
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