Oscar Luigi Scalfaro religion or worldview Catholicism
On 7 April 1994, Scalfaro co-officiated at the Papal Concert to Commemorate the Shoah at the Sala Nervi in Vatican City, along with Pope John Paul II, and Chief Rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff.
In recent times, Scalfaro was the chairman of the committee that advocated the abrogation, in the referendum of 25 and 26 June 2006, on the constitutional reform that had been passed in parliament the previous year by the former centre-right majority. Along with all the centre-left (and a few centre-right personalities, too), Scalfaro considered it to be dangerous for national unity and for other reasons. The opponents of the reform won a landslide victory in the referendum.
Scalfaro was the oldest surviving former Italian president and the second oldest member of the Senate, after Rita Levi-Montalcini. He consequently took the temporary presidency of the newly elected assembly which followed the 2006 general election, as Levi Montalcini refused the role because of her age. This made him one of the three politicians in Italian history to have presided over the three highest-ranked offices in the Italian Republic: President of the Republic, President of the Senate, and President of the Chamber of Deputies; the others are Sandro Pertini and Enrico De Nicola.
A staunch Catholic, and in the past, a rather conservative and anti-communist politician, Scalfaro nevertheless distrusted many members of the DC who changed support to Forza Italia, and was consistently on bad terms with Silvio Berlusconi. He openly supported the centre-left coalition, which included Democratic Party of the Left, which won the 1996 and 2006 elections. Despite his age, he also actively campaigned, for the "No" side, in the June 2006 referendum on a constitutional reform. This reform had been proposed by Berlusconi's House of Freedom coalition during its control of the government.
During the Second World War, in 1944, Scalfaro lost his 20-year-old wife Maria Inzitari, by whom he had a daughter, Marianna. He never married again.
After the 2008 parliamentary election, he was again asked to preside as pro tempore Speaker of the Senate after Rita Levi-Montalcini again refused the post, but this time he also declined to serve.
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