c. 2007 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ Hundreds of thousands of Italians are expected in Rome on Saturday (May 12) for an event that is officially neither religious nor political, yet clearly intended to promote the legislative agenda of the Roman Catholic Church.
More broadly, Saturday’s demonstration will help define Pope Benedict XVI’s vision of how the church should engage with public life, in Italy and abroad.
Lay Catholic organizations originally planned “Family Day” as a general celebration of marriage and family values in accordance with church teaching. But controversy over a proposed law has transformed the event into a de facto protest against same-sex unions.
Last year, the Italian center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi proposed a bill that would recognize “de facto couples,” a version of the civil unions that now exist in several other European countries.
Partners in such unions would enjoy certain legal rights traditionally associated with marriage, such as the ability to delegate medical decisions and to bequeath property to each other.
The legislation has aroused opposition not only in the center-right minority in parliament, but even among Catholic parties within the governing majority coalition.
When the Prodi government lost a confidence vote in the Senate in February, the ostensible reason was division over Italy’s military presence in Afghanistan; many observers, however, attributed the move to discord over the civil unions legislation.
Italian church leaders, including Benedict himself, have emphatically argued against legal recognition of non-marital unions.
The rhetoric has grown increasingly hostile on both sides. Threatening graffiti targeting the head of the Italian bishops’ conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, have appeared in several Italian cities in recent weeks. In late April, Bagnasco’s office received an envelope in the mail containing a bullet and the cardinal’s picture with a swastika carved into it.
For his part, Bagnasco incensed opponents in March with remarks that appeared to liken homosexuality to pedophilia and incest.
Last month, Archbishop Angelo Amato, the second-ranking official of the church’s top doctrinal body, characterized proponents of same-sex marriage _ along with supporters of legalized abortion _ as perpetrators of “terrorism with a human face.”
In this climate, the long-planned Family Day has almost inevitably taken on the function of a single-issue campaign event.
While the church is not an official sponsor of the demonstration and no prelates are expected to speak at it, the Italian bishops’ conference has made no secret of its support. Pastors and church schools have distributed promotional literature and encouraged families from all over the country to attend.
The Italian church has a long history of targeted involvement in electoral politics. For more than four decades, until the disintegration of the long-ruling Christian Democratic Party in the early 1990s, bishops and pastors explicitly directed the faithful to vote for the party, in order to keep the opposition communists out of power.
The church proved unsuccessful in trying to sway Italian voters against the legalization of divorce and abortion in the 1970s. But in 2005, a referendum to legalize in vitro fertilization failed to attract a quorum, after Italian bishops urged Catholics to stay home from the polls.
(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)
For Benedict, who in March lamented Europe’s “apostasy” from Christian values, the Italian struggle over civil unions is doubtless just one battle in a continental war over social issues including sexuality and medical ethics.
If his past statements are any guide, Benedict also wants non-European bishops to emulate the political commitment of their Italian peers.
During the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, when Benedict was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he told the American bishops that they could deny Communion to politicians who oppose church doctrine on abortion, though he said they were not required to do so.
KRE/PH END ROCCA
