Le relazioni con la Chiesa cattolica

This article examines the transformation of relations between the Italian Christian Democracy (DC) and the Catholic Church from the advent of the centre-left governments to the crisis of Catholic political unity in the mid-1970s. It argues that the years between the Second Vatican Council and the 1974 divorce referendum marked a decisive transition from the confessional and hierarchical model that had characterised the Pius XII era to a new and unstable configuration of Catholic political presence in republican Italy. Rather than interpreting the evolution of Church–DC relations solely through the categories of political alliance or institutional conflict, the article situates this process within the broader redefinition of Italian Catholicism after Vatican II. The gradual emancipation of the DC from ecclesiastical supervision, promoted above all by Aldo Moro and Amintore Fanfani during the opening to the centre-left, reflected not only changes within the party system but also a wider transformation in the political culture of Italian Catholics, increasingly shaped by secularization, pluralism, and new forms of lay participation. Particular attention is devoted to the convergence between the international strategy of the DC and the Holy See’s post-conciliar diplomacy. In the context of détente and Ostpolitik, the article reconstructs what it defines as a “diplomacy of the two shores of the Tiber”: a flexible and informal cooperation through which Vatican and Italian Catholic political leaders pursued common objectives of peacebuilding, international mediation, and defence of human rights, especially in Eastern Europe and Vietnam. The article further analyses the consequences of the “religious choice” adopted by Azione Cattolica, interpreting it as a crucial turning point in the dissolution of traditional Catholic collateralism and in the weakening of the social and organizational mechanisms that had long sustained the DC as the political expression of Italian Catholicism. At the same time, the post-conciliar crisis generated competing responses within the Catholic world, ranging from progressive dissent movements inspired by social radicalism to conservative mobilizations centred on moral and identity issues. The divorce referendum of 1974 ultimately revealed the growing fracture between ecclesiastical attempts to preserve Catholic unity in the public sphere and the profound secularization of Italian society. More broadly, the referendum exposed the exhaustion of the political model that had governed relations between Catholicism, party politics, and the republican state since the post-war period, opening a new phase characterized by fragmentation, political realignment, and the emergence of new ecclesial actors within Italian public life.