Italy's Christian Democracy: The Catholic Encounter with Political Modernity

Rosario Forlenza · Bj?rn Thomassen

May 2024 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

The first comprehensive study of Italian Christian Democracy in English, Italy's Christian Democracy unravels the encounter between Catholicism and democracy from pre-unification Italy in the eighteenth century to the near-present. Forlenza and Thomassen put the triumphant emergence of the Christian Democratic political party that ruled Italy from 1948 to 1994 into historical perspective. With a focus on critical moments of modern Italian history ? the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the Risorgimento, World War I, the fascist period, World War II, the post-war Republic ? Italy's Christian Democracy demonstrates the often-dramatic ways in which Catholic thinkers, from laymen to priests and bishops, sought to interpret and direct democratic thought and practice in line with Catholic ethics. The Christian Democracy was much more than reactionary politics ? namely a sincere attempt to integrate a religious worldview into modern politics. Contrary to a purely secular reading, the authors demonstrate that the Catholic embrace of political modernity and democracy emerged as a historically significant alternative to both fascism and socialism, liberalism and conservativism, attempting to re-anchor democracy, justice, and freedom in a religiously argued ethos. Italy's Christian Democracy contributes to existing scholarship by stressing two interrelated aspects crucial for a better understanding of the role that Catholicism and Christian Democracy have played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the political dimension of transcendence and spirituality and the transformative power of historical experiences and events. The narrative considers the religious and spiritual impulse behind Christian democratic thought, framing Christian Democracy as a distinct form of "political spirituality". Offering a novel historical narrative, Italy's Christian Democracy stresses the contemporary relevance of the nexus between Christianity and modern politics: the current spread of identity politics and the increasing use of religion in political and public discourse, recently appropriated by new populist parties and movements, in Italy and beyond.

About the author

Rosario Forlenza is Associate Professor of History and Political Anthropology in the Department of Political Science at Luiss University, Rome. He specializes in the history of modern Europe and Italy in its global implications. He has published six books and over forty peer-reviewed articles and chapters in The American Historical Review, Past & Present, Journal of Contemporary History and Contemporary European History. He is currently working on a comparative history of revolutions from the perspective of political anthropology, on the totalitarian experiences in interwar Germany, Italy, and Russia, and on the global history of Christian Democracy. Bj?rn Thomassen is Professor of Social Science in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University. Working between sociology, anthropology, and history, he has published widely across the social sciences on topics related to social theory, the history of anthropological thought, liminality and change, political revolutions, religion and ritual, nationalism, and borders and boundaries. He is currently leading a research project on global Catholicism, with a focus on Catholic migrant communities in a Danish and Scandinavian context, 'The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Global Modernities'.