Word: concordats
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February 11 is a national holiday inItaly. The date marks the anniversary of three historic pacts: the Lateran Treaty, which formally constituted Vatican City as an independent territorial state; a financial accord, which indemnified the Pope for the 19th century confiscation of the Papal States; and a concordat* to settle religious matters be tween the Roman Catholic Church and the government of Italy. Signed by Fas cist Dictator Benito Mussolini and a representative of Pope Pius XI, the pacts successfully survived World War II, Mussolini's fall and even a new post war constitution. But as Italy marked...
What disturbs the critics is a growing conviction that too many provisions in the agreement between Italy and the Vatican are no longer relevant to the nation's needs. As Salvatore Valitutti, a Liberal Party official, put it: "The concordat of 1929 was established between a state that was not free and a church not yet reconciled to the values of freedom." Many of the concordat's provisions run counter to the intent of Italy's postwar constitution, which states that "all religious confessions are equally free before the law." But the constitution also clearly ratifies...
...concordat has thus created a number of practical difficulties. Only ecclesiastical courts have any authority to annul a marriage; religious education is mandatory in public schools, even for non-Catholic children; defrocked priests may be kept from holding positions in which they meet the public; and despite free-speech guarantees, an iconoclastic play like Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy may be barred from performance in Rome because it allegedly defames Pope Pius...
Angry Editorials. Even some members of Italy's dominant Christian Democratic Party, despite its close ties to the Vatican, have long conceded the need for changes in the concordat. Unquestionably the most troublesome issue to be faced will be divorce, which is now impossible in Italy because the concordat's marriage clauses leave the state only with the power of granting civil separations. Angry editorials in the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano have already objected to recently introduced divorce legislation, and Vatican officials have privately made it clear that the papacy is not likely to move...
Since the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe after World War II, the Vatican has sought - largely in vain - to anchor the rights of Roman Catholics in Iron Curtain countries through protocol and concordat. Only lately has the realization seeped in that written agreements with Communist countries are the start, not the finish, of diplomacy - and that painful compromises are part of a tough bargain. Four years ago, the Holy See announced an elaborate formal agreement with Hungary that was supposed to mark the beginning of toleration for the country's 7,000,000 Catholics. But priests remained jailed...