A debate erupted in Italy last week when a local court ordered a public school to take its crucifixes off the walls, after an Islamic firebrand, Adel Smith, complained that their exposition discriminated against his sons. Outraged church leaders sprang to battle.
“The crucifix expresses the soul of our continent, and should remain the sign of European identity,” said Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the pope’s vicar for the Rome archdiocese and president of the Italian bishops’ conference.
To some extent it’s a tempest in a teapot, because no one believes the sentence will stand – Italy is not like France, with a Republican tradition of church/state separation. This is a country, after all, where the bishop’s conference last year received over $1 billion in public money. In the end, the crucifixes will remain.
Nevertheless, some observers believe there is a serious issue lurking beneath the theatrics.
“The Catholic church is no longer alone in Italy,” said Renzo Guolo, who teaches sociology of religion at the University of Trieste, and is a specialist in Islamic fundamentalism. He writes editorials on this subject for the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, Avvenire, and has recently published a book entitled Xenophobes and Xenophiles: Italians and Islam.
“The real problem is how Italy navigates the transition from being mono-cultural to being a religiously diverse society, especially with respect to Islam,” Guolo told NCR Oct. 28. And because much of the Catholic world takes cues from Italy, how the relationship with Islam is managed here will have wide consequences.
In his book, Guolo observed that in recent years the leadership of the Italian Church has shifted from a welcoming stance towards Islamic immigration, to a more “prudent” and at times critical posture.
“There are divergent positions,” Guolo said. “Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former archbishop of Milan, represented dialogue and openness, closer to the pope on this issue, whereas Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna and Bishop Alessandro Maggiolini of Como take a much harder line, demanding reciprocity in the Islam world for tolerance in the West.”
This second attitude, Guolo explained, tends to be directed not at Muslims as individuals, but their associations and institutions, such as the Saudi Arabia-funded Rome mosque.
Ruini, Guolo said, is somewhere in between, but has been moving steadily closer to the Biffi/Maggiolini stance. For Ruini, Guolo explained, this is part of a larger concern with the re-evangelization of Italian society.
Though Guolo did not develop the point, Vatican sources describe a similar divergence within the Holy See. The Martini position is associated with Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, while the Biffi/Maggiolini line has adherents in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Propaganda Fidei, and some elements in the Secretariat of State.
Guolo made the interesting point that the Ruini strategy, of aggressively defending the Catholic Church’s prerogatives, may backfire.
“Given the fact that Muslims will be increasingly present in Italy, there will be growing pressure to extend rights currently enjoyed by the church also to Muslims,” Guolo said. “By protecting its own interests, the church serves the interests of Islam.”
He offered the example of education, where the Italian Church has waged a long campaign to obtain state support for its schools. Ultimately social pressure will be intense to grant Islamic schools the same status, with the danger of creating cultural ghettoes.
“Would it be better for the church to accept a certain lay space in the public forum?” Guolo asked. “That’s a question that has to be faced.”
As the great Cardinal Biffi of Bolognia has pointed out, it is not a "given fact" that "Muslims will be increasingly present in Italy." It is within the power of the Italian government to stop Muslim immigraiton, which is clearly in the interests of the Italian people.
I pray God makes Bifi or someone like him the next pope. It is the last hope of preserving a Christian Europe.