# Religious Freedom between Politics and Policies: Social and Legal Conflicts over Catholic Religious Education in Italy, 1984–1992

Guillaume Silhol

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Guillaume Silhol. Religious Freedom between Politics and Policies: Social and Legal Conflicts over Catholic Religious Education in Italy, 1984–1992. Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion., 2021, Religious Freedom. Social-Scientific Approaches, 12, pp.220-240. 10.1163/9789004468085_012. hal-05176111

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Religious Freedom between Politics and Policies: Social and Legal
Conflicts over Catholic Religious Education in Italy, 1984–1992

Guillaume Silhol

Chapter 10 in Olga Breskaya, Roger Finke & Giuseppe Giordan (eds.), “Religious Freedom. Social Scientific Approaches” (issue), *Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion*, Vol. 12, 2021, pp. 220-240 (Leyden, Brill).

Religious freedom is a polysemic notion, operating both as a motive claimed by social
movements and civil value in contemporary societies, value which is embedded in social
practices, ideas, and rights. Individual and collective autonomy, areas of State administration and
international standards are central to usual definitions of religious freedom, they also are strongly
related to politics and public policies, and to the conflictual dynamics described by the concept
of judicialization (Richardson 2015; Breskaya and Giordan 2019). Judicialization of an issue
(public problem, political competition, policy program, etc.) refers to a process in which legal
actions are taken by social actors, unfolding in institutional arenas where recourses to the law
serve alternative visions of the “common good” as well as professional and strategic purposes
(Sarat and Scheingold 2006). Definitions of “religious freedom,” policy programs, and criteria of
interpretation by administrators and street-level bureaucrats are a significant part of the social
construction of this freedom. Courts can become sites of redefinition in the process of policy-
making, but they always do so in connection with other arenas of decisions and conflicts, from
parliaments to local agencies (Mayrl 2018). If inquiries on this theme are detached from the
perspective of history of law, focused on norms and doctrines (Ferrari 2012), they can renew
other research paths on “religious freedom.” In relation to studies of symbolic and practical
aspects, political perceptions and experiences, they can study how “religious freedom” becomes part of public problems in a specific society (Gusfield 1981), such as contemporary Italy. This chapter is an empirical contribution in political sociology to the research field on religion in public policies, with arguments from cause-lawyering and neo-institutional studies on State and religion (Mayrl 2011; Reeh 2013; Rota 2017, 114–37).

This analysis investigates a period of conflicts over the implementation of a reform of Catholic Religious Education (Insegnamento della Religione Cattolica, IRC) in Italian State schools, from the second half of the 1980s to the early 1990s, from a perspective in historical political sociology. Closely associated to the framework of State-Church relations, this reform was usually depicted as a shift from a compulsory school subject defined by the Catholic magisterium to a non-compulsory one with modernized curricula. Top-down negotiations between Catholic Church diplomats and government-backed delegations of legal experts in the previous decade were not the only impetus for this reform. It also was related to actions by other religious institutions and social movements, mainly teachers’ unions and secular activists, to redefine the scope of the subject in terms of “religious culture” (Caimi 2014). On February 18, 1984, when Socialist President of the Council Bettino Craxi and Secretary of State Cardinal Agostino Casaroli signed the Agreement of Villa Madama to reform the Concordat between the Italian State and the Holy See, including the matter of IRC, most questions of the implementation process were still to be arranged in additional, “technical agreements” with the Italian Bishops Conference (Conferenza Episcopale Italiana, CEI). Nonetheless, the modalities of implementation became conflictual (teaching hours, alternative subjects, teachers’ status, presence in school buildings for students who did not enroll, etc.). The process also led to long
sequences of actions and resort to administrative courts, bringing about the definition of State secularism as a supreme constitutional principle in 1989.

While the aftermath of the reform of Italian ecclesiastical law is evaluated as a conflictual
process, which triggered contradictory changes in Catholicism and on public debates, the case of
IRC has served to assess the social bases and the limits of its democratizing aspects (Ventura
2014b, 77–80). The empirical research on the implementation of the reform of IRC in the 1980s
and early 1990s is used in this chapter. It was based on a socio-historical inquiry on archives
from the Presidency of the Council, political parties (PCI, DC and Socialist Party—PSI), and
teachers’ unions (CGIL-Scuola and SISM-CISL), along with an analysis of digitized press archives
on IRC (in particular *Il Corriere della Sera*, *La Repubblica*, *La Stampa* and *L’Unità*). Twenty-
three semi-structured interviews were conducted with politicians, representatives, and militants
who were involved in the process in that period. Most of the research work took place between
late 2014 and early 2017 in Rome, for most political documents, and in Turin, with local and
unions archives, in order to develop an analysis of a complex diachronic redefinition. The
analysis of these sources requires a critical perspective, in order to avoid both the “flattening” of
conflicts by the institutional rhetoric of consensus, and militant memorial preoccupations that are
foreign to a sociological analysis. Against this background, the following questions are addressed
by the present chapter. What were the social conditions for the politicization and attempts of
redefinition of “religious freedom” in the implementation process of a reformed IRC, rather than
in previous periods? What role did courts play in the process? What consequences did these
conflicts bring to the bureaucratic management of “religious freedom?”

The main argument is that this definition of “religious freedom,” as a set of individual
rights in social life, arrangements, and collective guarantees justified by a notion of social
pluralism, is socially constructed in a conflictual process. This process includes phases of
judicialization, in which the courts are central spaces of interaction between political
competitors, religious organizations, social movements, and State agents, yet not isolated from
other institutional spaces (Agrikoliansky 2003, 63–66). It is relevant to assess not only the
expansion (Richardson 2015) but also the relative decrease of use of law on some peculiar
matters related to “religious freedom.” Indeed, the definition of “religious freedom” also results
from uneven social relations and from tensions between administrative regulation and social
movements. Concerning IRC between 1984 and 1992, the judicialization of conflicts in the
implementation of its reform brought about paradoxical changes. The process, marked by
significant changes in policy contents, meant a strategical retreat for partisans of a pedagogic
modernization, for a few militant secular actors and for Catholic bishops. Yet, it also produced
lasting structural constraints favoring a depoliticized, local bureaucratic-based management of
IRC from the 1990s, with a symbolic redefinition of “minority” statuses in schools.

After a short development on the case study, this chapter follows an analytic division in
three parts: first on “religious freedom” as a conflictual object framed by various institutions and
actors, then on collective actions and constraints for legal actions on IRC, and finally, on their
contradictory symbolic and administrative effects, before concluding remarks.

1 Religious Freedom in Context: the Case of Catholic Religious Education in Contemporary Italy

Since the Italian unification, the relationship between religious institutions and the educational
sector has retained a strong political significance even though it was marked by administrative
discontinuities related to the latter’s establishment as a markedly elitist school system. The
liberal elites that dominated the political field in the Italian constitutional monarchy were in
conflict with Catholics—both religious hierarchy and political leaders—until the early twentieth
century on many issues, including Religious Education. The subject was controlled and defined
by the Roman Catholic Church, based on catechetical texts, to be taught by schoolmasters in
primary schools and by chaplains in secondary schools. Although the 1877 Coppino Law did not
abolish Religious Education, it erased it from the official list of subjects in primary State schools.
The implementation devolved its management to town councils, giving way to informal
arrangements with very diverse local situations in terms of attendance. In spite of some
controversies against the subject among the Italian Socialist and center-left parties, this broad
configuration remained largely unchanged until the fascist regime and the Gentile Law in 1923
(Butturini 1987, 16–63). This reform sought to re-establish Religious Education, although still
defined according to the Catholic tradition and taught by schoolmasters, as a compulsory subject
in all primary State schools. It was defined in law as a “foundation and coronation of Public
Instruction,” but theorized by Minister Giovanni Gentile as a “minor philosophy”, which hardly
coincided with a traditional view of catechism. After years of negotiations, the new Concordat,
signed by Benito Mussolini and Cardinal Gasparri on January 11, 1929, was supposed to
symbolize a reconciliation between the totalitarian State and Catholic hierarchy by officializing
in Article 36 the extension of this compulsory character of Religious Education in secondary
schools (Pertici 2009,102–52). The downfall of fascism did not impact this legal framework,
mainly due to the prestige and influence of the Church and Catholic networks. After World War
II, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) brought a strategic political support for the inclusion of the
Concordat in Article 7 of the 1948 Constitution of the Italian Republic and most provisions and
curricula remained unchanged. Moreover, they were consolidated by Christian-Democrats’ (DC)
management of education in a favorable way to Catholic interests (Onida 2014).
Two long-term processes contributed toward putting the attempts of reforms of Religious Education on the political agenda in the early 1970s. Along with the consequences of the renewed pastoral practices encouraged by Catholic hierarchy after the Second Vatican Council, increased numbers of lay Catholics were recruited by dioceses to replace priests and chaplains as Religious Education teachers in secondary schools. Some of them took part in local movements and initiatives that renewed debates on the contents of the subject, including proposals of deconfessionalization by experts and intellectuals (Pietro Scoppola, Luciano Pazzaglia, Marcello Vigli ...) to teach "history of religions" or "religious culture" (Butturini 1987, 187-92).

Meanwhile, the open conflicts between DC representatives and secular movements, which led to symbolic defeats for the Church (referenda on divorce in 1974 and on abortion in 1981), fueled the legitimization of a general revision of the Concordat. The legal revision process was mostly consolidated behind closed doors with the bilateral Gonella-Casaroli commission, producing several successive versions of the treaty according to political and institutional constraints. The later form of Article 9.2, in the text signed on January 18, 1984, added the "Catholic" adjective to Religious Education, now IRC, and described it as a subject "chosen" by parents and pupils, rather than a compulsory one. New modalities and justifications from government officials and Church diplomats, especially on "the value of religious culture" and on the inclusion of "the principles of Catholicism [as part of] the historical heritage of the Italian people" (Article 9.2), and guarantees for "religious freedom" were put forward in the treaty and in political rhetoric (Silhol 2017). A few movements, such as the Radical Party, could contest these definitions and criticize latent contradictions in the legitimization of this revision. These changes and a new agreement with Waldensian and Methodist churches, signed three days later — justified by the government on the basis of an improved protection of religious freedom — left some issues
untouched. Far from closing a period of political conflicts on religion in the public space, the implementation of the reform led to their reconfiguration for a few years (Pazzaglia 2014, 271–73).

In that regard, the judicialization of “religious freedom” rested not only on conflictual perceptions of IRC, but also on resources, strategic shifts from opponents and supporters, and incorporation of the reform in bureaucratic practices. The analysis is unfolded successively on three aspects, frames used on “religious freedom,” conditions of collective actions including judicialization, and contradictory effects of this process between 1984 and 1992.

## 2 Framing “Religious Freedom” and Claiming the Definition of Changes in Religious Education

The implementation of norms from the revision of the Concordat on the redefined IRC rested upon volatile relations in the five-party (Pentapartito) majority with the legitimization of the support of the PCI in a “concordatarian majority” claimed by the Craxi government. The claim of the making of a policy of reform on “religious liberty,” together with the adoption of the revision of the Concordat and the agreement with Waldensian and Methodist churches, was constrained by bargains and internal tensions in the main parties, DC and PSI (Ginsborg 2007, 280–86). Thus, the official justifications of improvement of “religious freedom” were superposed over concurrent interests and conflicting frames. In the coalition government, the legitimization of the Concordat, as an improvement for individual and collective rights, outlined especially the case of IRC. Speaking in Senate on January, 25 1984, President of the Council Craxi argued that IRC:
[S]hould not be marginalized in the school system, and could be enriched by a perspective of religious culture and of historical reference of Italian Catholicism, which would however not infringe on the freedom of conscience of the persons concerned.

SENATO 1984, 9

While PSI leaders had to deal with internal discontents from their left-wing about perceived ambiguities in the implementation of the Concordat, the rival DC led by Ciriaco De Mita, despite a broader electoral support, appeared vulnerable in its privileged relationship with Catholic institutions and electorate. Despite their justification of Catholic control over Religious Education argued by Senator Antonio Bisaglia, in his direct reply to President Craxi on January 25 (Senato 1984, 14), the uncertainties about their role in the implementation process concerned margins of action left to Christian-Democrat Minister of Public Instruction Franca Falcucci and to bishops. For example, in a letter by the Italian ambassador to the Holy See addressed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Giulio Andreotti—then a powerful right-wing leader in DC close to Vatican officials — IRC was described as a “painful question” for bishops, with the fear of dwindling numbers of enrolled students (Chelli 1984, 7–8). While the CEI representatives, mainly Bishop Attilio Nicora, were designated to discuss the modalities of implementation, the pontifical rhetoric of “complementarity and distinction” between traditional catechesis and IRC, urging Catholic parents to enroll their children to both, was maintained. In that frame, the autonomous finalities of schools were not incompatible with the duty to provide Italian youth with a “skillful and appropriate Religious Education”, according to Pope John Paul II in his official letter to the CEI in May 1984 (Giovanni Paolo II 1984). Conversely, positions in the PCI were divided between the official endorsement of an improvement of religious freedom
represented by direction members, such as Senator Paolo Bufalini, responsible for relations with
the Catholic Church, and more skeptical members, such as the director of the party's Education
Office, Senator Aureliana Alberici. Thus, the tacit tensions and visions of the expected effects of
the Villa Madama Agreement among left-wing parties appeared to some observers, such as
Catholic PSI Senator Gennaro Acquaviva, as remnants of old-fashioned anticlericalism caused by
the uncertainties of the implementation and the behavior of Minister Falcucci (Acattoli,
Acquaviva, and De Rita 1987, 89-90). A few small left-wing parties, such as Marco Pannella's
Radical Party and the Independent Left, were still openly anti-Concordat, and they had supported
previous motions to abolish Religious Education in State schools (Rodelli 1980). Finally, some
other religious institutions, less endowed in resources and membership than the Roman Catholic
Church, could express a peculiar prudence about IRC — for example in the agreement (Intesa)
between the Waldensian and Methodist churches and the Italian government of February 1984.
Indeed, Article 9 of this agreement, while not contesting its existence in State schools, asked for
“in order to guarantee everyone's freedom of conscience, the right not to benefit from the
practices and of [IRC] on the basis of their declaration, or those of their parents or tutors.” As for
Article 10, it theorized the possibility of organizing proper alternative classes on “the history of
the religious fact and its implications” (sic) on request of students who would not enroll in IRC.
Yet, requests from their representatives to put the schedule of IRC in the first or the last hours of
schooldays, on the grounds of guaranteeing non-discrimination of non-Catholic students, had to
be erased from the draft and replaced by a mere statement of principle in the final version, due to
demands from DC components of the majority (Bouchard 2015).

Subsequently, the implementation process brought about significant changes on how
these frames on “religious freedom” were formulated, and on how they were used to legitimize
or criticize the official arrangements on IRC. Negotiations behind closed doors between representatives of the Ministry of Public Instruction and Catholic officials on the IRC were delayed until the ratification of the Concordat in 1985, raising criticism from left-wing parliamentarians. The main components of the specialized agreement on IRC, signed by Minister Falcucci and Cardinal Ugo Poletti, president of the CEI, on December 13, 1985, such as the validity of students' enrollment for whole school cycles, the discretionary aspect of IRC scheduling left to school principals, or the required degrees to teach IRC, gained visibility mostly through their denunciations by opponents in the following weeks (Giani 1990, 52–55). This publicity over the agreement as a problem resulted in various collective actions in political parties, teachers' unions, and media, and its extension to the parliamentary arena through a series of realignments. These included a hostile position from the direction of PCI to the agreement and the minister's "behavior," and a collective petition from left-wing intellectuals asking for extracurricular schedules for IRC, published by Communist newspaper *L'Unità* in January (Anon 1986). The broad disagreement over the definition of "religious freedom" inside the government majority quickly became more visible. DC leader Ciriaco De Mita demanded that Minister Falcucci would be protected by governmental solidarity from a threat of vote of no confidence supported by left-wing deputies, discussed on January 14, 1986, a move reluctantly approved in the Council of Ministers the following day according to the minutes of the meeting (Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri 1986). While DC representatives argued in favor of the enactment of "an agreement for freedom," the request of specific alternative subjects for students who did not enroll and the subsequent debate on their freedom of choice in high schools, created additional tensions. For example, DC Deputy Costante Portatadino — a member of the Catholic conservative group Communion and Liberation — sent a letter to the president of the
parliamentary group and to the minister one week after the heated debate. Opposed to conceding
a form of “religious majority” in high schools, he stressed that granting thirteen-and-a-half-year-
old students the faculty of choice undermined parental authority (Portatadino 1986). Thus, the
apparent consensus on the value of “religious freedom” carried by the new concordatarian norms
on IRC was replaced by another configuration, which outlined divisions within and outside the
majority, through the connection between social movements involved in protests and legal
actions, and party politics.

3 Collective Actions on “Religious Freedom”: Judicialization and its Conditions

Various groups investing the implementation of IRC's reform took the opportunities of
judicialization as long as this ground was legitimately and successfully better for them than
bureaucratic arrangements. This stated, we can examine social conditions for such material,
symbolic, and effective investments by directing our study on these groups themselves and their
actions, considered as the “demand-side” (McCann 2009, 837–38), not only on jurisprudence.

In the case of contesting actions directed at circulars from the Ministry of Instruction on
the implementation of the reform of IRC, these legal actions rested upon differentiated practical
knowledges of legal activism, which were not evenly distributed and used among representatives
of religious institutions. Indeed, the personnel of the Waldensian and Methodist churches had a
long history of contesting administrative coercive provisions with lawyers and experts, including
Giorgio Peyrot who had defended individual cases of evangelicals and Pentecostals since the
first decades of the Italian Republic (Mannucci 1994, xxi–xxix). Previous actions supported by
Protestant officials had denounced the payment of fiscal stamps by pupils’ parents to ask for
exemption from Religious Education, for example in September 1980, with the request to
withdraw this “tax” from the general assembly of a local section of secular teachers’ union (UIL-Scuola) and parents’ organizations in Turin (UIL-Scuola 1980). Meanwhile, Jewish lawyers had represented the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in negotiating an agreement with the government, signed in 1987, and this organization took part in legal actions against IRC, along with the main Protestant churches. Smaller religious communities, such as Italian Lutherans, although critical of IRC, did not hold enough resources to take part in legal actions (Bachrach 2010, 25–50). Conversely, the established relationships between DC and Italian Catholic institutions, which were gradually evolving from 1986 with the proactive political line endorsed by the new Secretary of CEI Bishop Camillo Ruini (Santagata 2014, 440–43), did not favor direct initiatives from the Catholic Church in courts. Christian Democrats in government were supposed to legitimize and counter-attack such criticism while negotiations between ministry personnel and Church officials happened behind closed doors. Recourses emanated mainly from ministers rather than from the CEI until 1990. Indeed, the structural constraints of the gradual end of a State religion status for Catholicism and opportunities for pluralistic recognition in the religious field meant that beliefs and ideas could explain the meanings given to the defense of rights and to “religious freedom,” but not the actual sequences of judicialization (Hoover and den Dulk 2004, 21–26).

Other aspects of the legal actions against ministerial circulars on IRC, such as their relations to other modes of actions and to the making of cause coalitions in the implementation process, must be taken into account. Among the early actions undertaken by secular parents’ organizations, lawyer Paolo Barile, a well-known secular activist and civil law professor in Florence, presented a case in December 1984, supported by the Waldensian and Methodist churches. The preliminary question of constitutionality of the very presence of Religious
Education in schools was ineffective, however, and it was rejected by judges of the Constitutional Court (Tosatti 1985). Thus, changes in goals, framing and coordination of actions in legal arenas on IRC were brought about by strategic constraints, among which the support of significant parts of left-wing parties for actions against the implementation, rather than against the Concordat itself. On July 10, 1986, the National Committee School and Constitution (CNSC) was formed by claiming the opposition to circulars, especially on the obligation for unenrolled students to stay in schools during IRC hours and on the claim of an unambiguously facultative character of IRC. The CNSC was based on local committees mainly active in cities such as Rome, Bologna, Turin, and Milan, with support from left-wing teachers' unions (especially CGIL-Scuola andUIL-Scuola) and preexisting secular movements, such as the Association for Religious Freedom in Italy based in Milan, according to its manifesto against IRC published in the professional journal *Scuola e Città* in October 1986 (Comitato Nazionale Scuola e Costituzione 1986). The coalition operated as a legal information platform and militants' network, presenting a series of cases to regional administrative courts against the circulars, petitions to schedule IRC classes in extracurricular hours, and calls directed toward parents not to “choose” IRC for their children. While the implementation of reform produced additional tensions in the Catholic Church, the actions of CNSC did not end up in a united front against the Concordat. They did not prove consensual in all school contexts, due to other issues and disagreements. Indeed, some IRC teachers, who were often represented by teachers' union SISM-CISL and by autonomous unions, were active in organizing conferences to ask for a more secure regulation of their posts, which had been adapted from former part-time positions for clergy and through which dioceses controlled their working hours and careers. These groups of IRC teachers contested the arrangements sought by the Catholic hierarchy for their professional norms deemed too
precarious, being uneasy with concordatarian and derived norms, and they gained the support of
some left-leaning DC representatives and of SISM-CISL National Secretariat (Dolcetti 1991). Yet,
they also had to face local opposition from other unions, some militant teachers, and potential
colleagues.

In that regard, judicialization of “religious freedom” was inseparable from the use of
specialized legal resources and from the ability of local teachers’ collectives and religious
institutions to argue about a general value for their claims against the modalities of policy
implementation. It helped dramatize and politicize the issues of situations defined as
discriminatory, based on frames critical of an “opaque” negotiation process and its effects.
However, the specificities of the judicialization process also incurred bureaucratic arrangements
and setbacks for opponents to the new regime of IRC, as well as issues about the sustainability of
involvement in these recourses to the law.

## 4 Contradictory Effects, between Judicialization and Bureaucratization of Secular Motives

First of all, the visible judicialization of “religious freedom” in the case of IRC brought structural
and symbolic effects on the policy contents, both at a local level and in national arenas. In local
educational contexts, according to local strengths of teachers’ unions, Catholic associations and
State bureaucracies, the modalities of inserting IRC and “alternative subjects” could give way to
some reactions from the early phase. For instance, in Turin, during the first school year with the
new IRC, 1986–1987, local secular activists as well as collectives of teachers printed leaflets
against the effects of the revised Concordat in schools. At least fifteen letters of protest against
the vagueness of dispositions on IRC, on the contents of “alternative subjects” and their teaching
staff, were sent by assemblies of secondary schoolteachers (collegi dei docenti) of Turin in fall
1986 to the provincial school administration and to teachers' unions. One such letter written by the council of teachers of the Matteotti middle school in Turin in September 1986, representative of such claims, indicted the ministry's circulars as a blow to secular principles of the State:

> The articles of [the ministerial circular] are a confirmation of the low esteem in which teaching staff's professionalism is held, to whom [the minister] considers adding aggravated responsibilities and broadened competences, without any prior consultation of adequate information. In addition to this, the implementation of articles proves to be discriminatory for youth who choose not to benefit from [IRC], in that the State considers as constitutional the presence in the school of a teacher chosen by the diocesan authority for Religious Education, and not the one of a teacher put in charge of alternative activities.

COLLEGIO DEI DOCENTI SM MATTEOTTI DI TORINO 1986

Later actions led by secular activists and parents' associations related to the CNSC included legal support for students who resented being forced to attend “alternative subjects,” or even the rejection of “pervasive” influence of Catholicism in textbooks, with a successful legal action taken by parents of kindergarten children in 1990 in Turin supported by the Turinese Committee for Secularism in Schools (Comitato Torinese per la Laicità della Scuola 2003, 34–37).

At the national level, some collective actions could reach higher effects and levels, leading to counter-actions from the coalition governments and new questions of constitutionality that formed jurisprudential references for later doctrines of State secularism. The following table was elaborated by listing the main decisions by the Constitutional Court on IRC between 1984 and 1992, inventoried in a report by the research office of the Italian Senate (Borsi 1999), and
other significant decisions from lower courts described in a well-documented journalistic account (Giani 1990) and in contemporary press archives (mainly from Rome-based daily newspaper *La Repubblica*). It sums up the most important sentences in the process of judicialization of IRC from 1984 to 1992.

Table 10.1 Here

Before June 1987, the controversies over the implementation of IRC were politically dealt with by informal renewed negotiations between agents of the cabinet of the Ministry of Public Instruction, DC deputies, and CEI representatives. These talks included requests from the Secretary of the CEI, Bishop Ruini, toward the DC, to draft other norms on the contents and teaching staff of “alternative subjects,” for which he proposed a curriculum on human rights (Martini 1987b). However, the results of the June 1987 general elections reinvigorated right-wing currents of DC against its leadership, and showed gains for PSI at the expense of PCI (Ginsborg 2007, 293–309). In addition to these political constraints, the discussions between the Ministry and Catholic institutions were impacted by the first phase of judicialization, bringing about a more formal approach. On June 26, 1987, the Administrative Regional Court of Latium stated that the compulsory character of “alternative subjects” for students who did not enroll in IRC, as prescribed by Ministerial Circular 302–1986, was irregular. After a reversal of this decision by a sentence of the Council of State in August 1987, the new coalition government presided over by DC Deputy Giovanni Goria, still reliant on support from the PSI and three smaller allied parties, had to face an uncertain solution. In order to help the new DC Minister of Instruction Giovanni Galloni, who was being criticized by left-wing parties, members of the DC central offices, in particular the Deputy for Lucca and representative of DC for Catholic associations, Maria Eletta Martini, attempted to draft a consensual motion to obtain a minimal adjustment without a revision of the 1985 “technical” agreement (Martini 1987a). Yet, under the
threat of hostile votes from the left, a diplomatic letter from the Vatican protested against the
perspective of unilateral changes on the norms of IRC, giving way to renewed criticism of
"clerical interference" (Tosatti 1987). After two days of intense debates in the Chamber of
Deputies on October 9, and 10, 1987, a motion was approved by the majority, which forced the
Goria cabinet to re-negotiate implementation modalities of IRC (Giani 1990, 64-67). The next
three years saw both a return to talks behind closed doors with an emphasis on "technical" rather
than "political" issues from DC officials, and increased difficulties to legitimize the enactment of
the revision of the Concordat in schools. Following administrative-judicial decisions, particularly
from the Council of State in 1988 and 1990 and from the Constitutional Court in 1989 and 1991,
openly hostile stances appeared in parties that had previously supported the 1984 agreement. The
new direction of PCI, that led to its gradual transformation into a social-democratic party between
1989 and 1991, adopted positions more akin to the criticism of the Concordat as outdated for
secular modern, pluralistic Italy. Meanwhile, the "stop-and-go" logic of legal actions from the
CNSC and counter-actions from Italian governments reached the constitutional level. The
203/1989 decision of the Constitutional Court, in April 1989, promoted a new definition of State
secularism as a supreme principle of the constitutional order, and stated students' right to enroll
neither in IRC nor alternative activities.

One recalls, in matter of [IRC], the respect of freedom of conscience and parents' educational
responsibility, which find a guarantee in the Constitution of the Republic respectively in articles
19 and 30. Yet before the positive teaching of a religion made "in conformity with Church
doctrine," according to provision of point 5, letter a, of additional protocol, the secular State has
the duty to ensure that the liberties of article 19[...] and parents' educational responsibility do not
end up undermined. Here comes the instrumental logic inherent to the State-community which welcomes and ensures citizens' self-determination, through the recognition of a subjective right to benefit or not from [IRC]. This right belongs to parents and, for high schools, directly to students, on the basis of article 1.1 of Law n°281 of June 18, 1986. Such a figure of subjective right has no precedent.

CORTE COSTITUZIONALE 1989

These conclusions reinforced constraints for Catholic officials to use motives more acceptable for political counterparts, and to adapt their overall strategy to this jurisprudence. One particular way through which the CEI sought to use the rhetoric on students' needs of a "religious culture" in their formation became the regular use of official communications to students and parents before the deadline of choices every year. From a peripheral topic of bishops' communication, IRC became a central theme, reorganized with an explicit coordination of dioceses by the CEI and its National Office of Catechesis (Marzano and Urbinati 2013, 53-56). In the legal-administrative arena, the Catholic Church hierarchy finally sought to contain the effects of constitutional jurisprudence with its own statement of case presented by two lawyers before the Council of State in May 1990 (La Rocca 1990). The temporarily successful outcome of this action and the revision of the agreement on IRC on June 13, 1990, signed by Cardinal Poletti and Minister of Public Instruction Sergio Mattarella, stabilized some arrangements, among which provisions to avoid a pervasive Religious Education, strict limits on IRC teachers' votes in pedagogic commissions, and other "technical" aspects (Pazzaglia 2015, 70-78). However, the following year, decision n°13-1991 of the Constitutional Court outlined the non-compulsory character of both IRC and "alternative subjects" with students' right not to stay in school
buildings in that schedule, confirming an ordinance from a judge in Arezzo, Tuscany. This was
interpreted as a “defeat” in Catholic institutions, followed by the resignation of Cardinal Poletti
from the Presidency of the CEI, as Pope John Paul II appointed former Secretary Cardinal
Camillo Ruini in this position and as head of the Vicariate in Rome on March 7, 1991 (Galavotti
2011).

Hence, the publicizing of the issues of IRC was a critical factor in the redefinition of
“religious freedom.” When IRC was brought to the legal arenas by its opponents, activists,
lawyers, teachers, and parents, dramatization helped its redefinition as a problem of school
management, rather than on pedagogic grounds as expected previously. **Figure 10.1** below gives
a view on the coverage of the issue by a national left-wing daily newspaper based in Rome, *La
Repubblica*, between 1984 and 1993, through 424 articles directly about IRC.<fnref n="1" />

<caption>Figure 10.1 Here</caption>

Several peaks appear in the reporting of the judicialization of IRC, for example with 32 articles in
the sole month of January 1986 with the first controversy on the agreement on IRC in Parliament,
in Summer 1987, and between March and May 1989 after the first significant sentence from the
Constitutional Court, before a steady decrease after 1990. While most articles on IRC were
written by the “Vaticanist” reporters of *La Repubblica*, Domenico Del Rio and Orazio La Rocca,

<footnote n="1">¹ This graph was elaborated from the results of a research in the digitalized archives of *La Repubblica* with the keywords “religione” (religion) and “scuola” (school), based on articles published between January 1, 1984 and December 31, 1993. Readers’ mails and unrelated contents were taken out of the 788 results, to establish a basis of 424 articles dealing with IRC. See *La Repubblica.it—Archivio*, accessed on 03/06/2019 on https://ricerca.repubblica.it/.</footnote>
those published in "heated" phases of controversy were more likely to be categorized as education or political news.

The implications of this publicity have been ambiguous concerning the redefinition of "religious freedom" in Italian public spaces. Along with situations of pupils left alone in corridors covered by opponents, or classes of students made uneasy by a "default" IRC choice, reported in some secular and left-wing groups (Fotia and Mariconda 1987), the series of collective actions, petitions and legal attempts contributed to the reshaping of political rhetoric on religion in Italian schools with normative and secular motives (de Galembert and Koenig 2014, 643). Paradoxically, Catholic representatives had to justify the presence of IRC in schools as a subject of "religious culture" open to all pupils independently from their beliefs, while opponents would argue against it on the basis of its confessional character in law. The sensibilization of the schools public and agents to these issues found nonetheless some limits with the gradual reduction of opportunities to contest features of the policy process. The last decision from the Constitutional Court to define IRC schedules as an autonomous competence of school directions in 1992 confirmed this shift from judicialization to an institutionalization of ordinary conflicts in schools' bureaucratic management (Mayrl 2011). The process also favored the rise of the CEI as a representation of interests for Italian Catholicism at the expense of DC representatives that were its traditional stakeholders, as the party was dissolved in 1994 after two years of anti-corruption inquiries and political upheavals (Scoppola 2006, 147-89). The CEI's routinized communication patterns on IRC legitimized its ownership over the problem of "religious culture," as a pedagogic matter less controversial than students' rights of opting-out. As the expected general dwindling of "choice" of IRC did not occur in official data, this rhetoric gradually stressed high rates of attendance of IRC over 90 percent until the 2010s, akin to the
theme of a “national majority.” The CEI’s almost uncontested monopoly on national statistics of
IRC contributed to the legitimization and continuation of this position. Moreover, the alliance of
Cardinal Ruini’s CEI with Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalitions until the late 2000s followed
through political exchanges, including the July 18, 2003 Law on IRC teachers’ permanent posts.
These recruitment norms ensured guarantees for diocesan control without completely
homogenizing their status to the one of teachers of other subjects (Marzano and Urbinati 2013,
17–23). In brief, the social conditions of politicization of IRC became less favorable to its
opponents and more to its promoters, using “religious freedom” as a general, consensual motive
rather than a strategic claim.

5 Concluding Remarks

From 1984 to 1992, the enactment of the revision of the Concordat had to cope with
contradictory conflicts and new patterns of regulation during a period of unstable power relations
in politics. The first analytical part showed that “religious freedom” was politicized and
redefined through a conflict of frames, referring to the ambiguous implementation of the reform
of IRC after 1984. While members of the “concordatarian majority” emphasized its value for
“religious freedom,” its new modalities proved to be controversial and received an unexpected
publicity. In the second part, based on archival documents from parties, unions and newspapers, I
argued that this process was continuously influenced by collective actions and various coalition
causes between some political actors, teachers’ unions, lawyers, and minority religious groups.
Consequently, the judicialization of “religious freedom” was related to opposing social actors’
interests and diverse resources and beliefs, who played a major part in the framing of “religious
freedom,” up to a jurisprudential definition of State secularism as a supreme constitutional
principle that protects this freedom in schools. When these political and administrative
configurations changed, along with established interinstitutional relationships exemplified by the
demise of the DC and the rise of the CEI, the logic of local arrangements ultimately prevailed over
the recourses to the law and to the courts. The request for “choice” of IRC, or Catholic
hierarchy’s voicing of “social demand” (Ventura 2014a, 71–73), did not entail a full
democratization of IRC, but rather the institutionalization of an updated discretionary
management that rarely favors alternative options (Bossi 2017). The management of “religious
freedom” in Italy was produced through this peculiar conflict, even though its legal
rationalization expanded later independently from this context. Since the mid-1990s, the social
pluralization of the Italian religious field has been mostly disconnected from the production of
new legal agreements of recognition (*intese*) between the State and religious institutions, stopped
between 1994 and 2012. As for IRC, although a few legal actions and local controversies (often
on account of some behavior deemed inappropriate from individual teachers or diocesan staff)
have occurred since then, none has reached the degree of publicity of the previous period, or
gained as much visibility as the controversies over the crucifix in classrooms or campaigns
against construction of mosques led by right-wing movements (Ozzano and Giorgi 2016). In that
regard, the case of IRC shows the relevance of the political context, as well as strategies of
disruption and conservation of dominant positions in specific sectors, in studying the social
fabric of “religious freedom.”<fnref n="2" />

<footnote n="2">² This chapter is based on a part of my thesis presented on December 20, 2019 in Aix-en-
Provence. My research benefited from a three-year funding by the French Ministry of
Research and Higher Education (2013–2016), two research grants from the *Ecole
française de Rome* (May 2015, March 2016) and the visiting researcher program of the
*Culture, Politica e Società* Department of the University of Turin in Spring 2017. I thank</footnote>
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<table><caption>TABLE 10.1 Main judicial sentences concerning IRC between 1984 and 1992</caption><thead><tr><td>Jurisdiction and date</td><td>Complainants, subjects and institutions</td><td>Decision</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Constitutional Court, December 11, 1984</td><td>Coordinamento Genitori Democratici, lawyer Paolo Barile</td><td>The Court judges ruled they were not able to assess the constitutionality of IRC.</td></tr><tr><td>Regional Administrative Court of Latium, June 26, 1987</td><td>CNSC, Waldensian and Methodist Churches</td><td>The Court halted the execution of Ministerial Circular 302-1986, which forced schools to provide lessons to students who did not enroll in IRC.</td></tr><tr><td>Regional Administrative Court of Latium, February 10, 1988</td><td>CGIL-Scuola</td><td>The Court stated that “alternative activities” were not compulsory for students who did not enroll in IRC.</td></tr><tr><td>Constitutional Court, April 11, 1989</td><td>Lawyers Paolo Barile, Andrea Proto Pisani, Elia Clarizia and Corrado Mauceri—related to CNSC</td><td>The Court confirmed the non-compulsory character of both IRC and “alternative activities”.</td></tr><tr><td>Regional Administrative Court of Latium, February 2, 1990</td><td>Waldensian and Methodist, Evangelical Federation, Adventist and Pentecostal churches, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, and pupils’ parents from Cagliari</td><td>The Court canceled circulars and administrative provisions ordering students to stay in class even though they were not enrolled neither in IRC nor “alternative activities”.</td></tr><tr><td>Council of State, May 5, 1990</td><td>Ministry of Public Instruction, CEI</td><td>The Council of State canceled the former decision of the Regional Administrative Court.</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><caption>FIGURE 10.1 Articles dealing with IRC published in *La Repubblica* between 1984 and 1993</caption><tr><td>Constitutional Court,<br/>January 14· 1991</td><td>CNSC</td><td>The Court authorized students who enrolled in neither IRC nor “alternative activities” to leave secondary school premises during IRC hours.</td></tr><tr><td>Constitutional Court,<br/>June 22· 1992</td><td>Praetor (judge) of Trani, Puglia,<br/>and pupils’ parents.</td><td>Kindergarten directors were competent for the schedules of IRC hours.</td></tr></table>