by John L. Allen Jr.
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
In Italy, Thomas Jefferson’s famous “wall” separating church and state is more like a porous membrane, with influences both direct and indirect passing back and forth on virtually a daily basis. Some enterprising reporter would do well to monitor the level of phone traffic in any given week between the Quirinale, the seat of the secular Italian state, and the Vatican – one imagines it would be revealing.
Aside from a few anti-clerical radicals who have carved out a small political niche by antagonizing the church, no serious politician of any stripe here craves being at odds with the pope or the Italian hierarchy.
Thus it was that when Prime Minister Romano Prodi visited Benedict XVI on Friday, his first official visit as head of government, he did so with a certain anxiety. Despite the fact that Prodi is a longtime Catholic activist associated with circles in Bologna around the late Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, one of the progressive heroes at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Prodi also presides over a center-left coalition whose domestic policies on sexuality and the family are not fully at odds with church teaching.
Most notably, the center-left government that came to power last May seems poised to move ahead with some legal recognition of “de facto couples,” meaning couples who share a life without the trappings of formal marriage.
In the press released issued by the Holy See after the 35-minute encounter between Benedict and Prodi, the summary of the discussion began with “bioethics and the defense and promotion of life and the family” – a pointed reminder of the church’s opposition to this aspect of the new government’s program.
According to government sources, Prodi took pains to distinguish his program from that of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who has embraced gay marriage and adoption by homosexual couples. Prodi argues instead that his policy is really aimed at stabilizing the rights of individuals on property, health, inheritance and work-place benefits, without assigning any formal recognition to “de facto couples” as an alternative to marriage.
For his part, Prodi repeatedly stressed after the encounter that he and Benedict passed most of their time together discussing the international situation, including the Middle East and relations with Islam.
Here, the two men could find virtual unanimity, especially in light of an Italian Senate resolution on Thursday expressing “full solidarity” with Benedict in the wake of the protests that followed his Sept. 12 comments on Islam in Regensburg, Germany. (The full text of that resolution appears separately under “daily news and updates”).
The Vatican press release states that Prodi and Benedict also covered “dialogue between religions and culture, and the education of the young. In addition, there was an examination of the themes of international policy, above all in relation to the situation in the Middle East and the Italian commitment in Lebanon, as well as the importance of Christian values in the process of European integration.”
Diplomats in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State prepare for the visit of an Italian Prime Minister with special care, assuming that the Italian government is the most reliable conduit for their concerns to arrive in the “mixing bowl” of European Union debate, so the themes listed above represent a synthesis of the Vatican’s most pressing political concerns.
No one pretends that the Vatican is any longer in a position to dictate the terms of political life in Italy; defeats in referenda on divorce in 1974 and abortion in 1981 long ago made that point. On the other hand, the surprising victory of the Italian bishops and lay activists in a referendum on in-vitro fertilization last summer showed that the church still has gas left in its political tanks. Hence Prodi's visit to Benedict XVI was much more than a courtesy call – it was a recognition that here in Italy, the art of governance inevitably passes through the papal apartments.
