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Vatican, not Afghanistan, sank Prodi
The plan to give same sex couples some legal rights was able to hijack an essential and poignant issue such as the Afghanistan-NATO vote, illustrating the Vatican's level of influence in Italian politics.
Commentary by Eric J. Lyman in Rome for ISN Security Watch (02/03/07)
Nobody knew it at the time, but the fate of the Romano Prodi government that suddenly collapsed on 21 February was almost surely sealed two days before Prodi handed in his resignation, during what seemed to be a seemingly insignificant closed-door meeting with officials from the Holy See.
Officially speaking, the government failed after Prodi's allies fell two votes short of the majority needed to gain approval on a vote backing Italy's peacekeeping role within the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. But while the debate over Italy's 1,900 Afghan-based troops may have been the final act in Prodi's nine-month tenure, the real culprit now appears to be Prodi's plans to legalize same-sex marriages in Italy.
Italian newspapers report that Prodi, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and around a half dozen high-ranking government officials met on 19 February in the Vatican with several high-level advisers to Pope Benedict XVI. The meeting was called to give the Vatican officials a chance to lobby Prodi to remove the so-called "civil union proposal" from his agenda. At first, it seemed the effort failed.
While the transcript of the meeting has not been released, the local media reported that 67-year-old Prodi left the talks looking flushed. Asked how the talks went, the prime minister, known for his long, rambling responses, managed only a single unconvincing word: "bene" - Italian for "well."
In retrospect, it did not go well at all. Abandoned two days later by three proudly Catholic Senators, the Prodi coalition's modest majority in the Senate became a two-vote minority, and the Afghan security vote failed (the left-leaning daily newspaper La Repubblica noted that all three Senators had backed similar policies in the past).
Hours later, Prodi resigned. And when Napolitano asked him to form a new government a few days later - "There was no other realistic alternative," Italy's leading daily Corriere della Sera quoted Napolitano as saying - Prodi was able to pull one together with the support of the three wayward Catholic Senators and a few others.
After several long nights of negotiations, Prodi's backers and several fence-sitters all signed off on a 12-point plan for governance essentially identical to the plan he adopted before his resignation, save one conspicuous absence: the plan to legalize civil unions, including same sex unions - the one government plank strongly opposed by the Vatican - was nowhere to be found.
Beyond the normal power level
A spiritual touchstone for the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, the Vatican city-state is the world's smallest and least populated country with an ancient history that includes the legend that the apostle Peter was buried at the site. But it exists as in its current form, as an independent city-state, only since 1929, recent enough that no pope has been born since then (the 79-year-old Benedict was a baby when the Vatican became independent).
Nineteen twenty-nine is the year Italian strongman leader Benito Mussolini sought to reduce friction from Italy's 1871 unification by forging a deal to create the Vatican as a tiny, independent nation with fewer than 600 citizens and territory small enough to walk across in ten minutes.
The Lateran Treaty that created the truce granted the Vatican autonomy, its own legal and postal system, internationally recognized sovereignty and the military protection of the Italian state. In return, the Vatican agreed to stay out of Italian politics.
In practice, that is a promise that has rarely been kept.
"The Church and the Italian state have endured a long and uneasy relationship since the start," University of Bologna historian Massimo Crippa told ISN Security Watch. "The Vatican is an absolute monarchy surrounded by a modern democracy, a state whose first duty is to God contained within one whose first duty is to its constituents or countries it allies itself with."
While Mussolini made the Vatican independent from Italy, there is some debate about the extent to which Italy is truly independent from the Vatican.
After Mussolini was deposed, Italy went through a steady stream of governments - Prodi's new government is Italy's 62nd in just under 61 years - and a single and unabashedly pro-Vatican political party, the Christian Democrats, provided almost all the prime ministers between 1946 and 1992, when the party was disbanded amid corruption allegations (Prodi himself is a former Christian Democrat). That series of prime ministers included the iconic Roman power broker Giulio Andreotti seven times.
The 88-year-old Andreotti is a polarizing figure in Italy, with allegedly strong ties to both the Mafia and the Holy See. The fictional figure character Don Licio Lucchesi from the film "The Godfather Part III" - a pro-Church political kingpin with Mafia ties - is said to have been modeled on Andreotti, who is the only active member of the current Italian parliament elected when it was first created in 1946. And, not coincidently, Andreotti was one of three Italian Senators who held the government hostage by voting against the Afghanistan security measure as a way of forcing a change on the civil union issue the Vatican so strongly opposed.
With the tiny Vatican city-state coiled in the heart of the Italian capital and more than 90 percent of Italy's population at least nominally Catholic, it may not seem a surprise that the Holy See has some influence over some Italian politicians. But true situation goes far beyond normal levels of power.
Same sex issue hijacks Afghan vote
Many would argue that the Vatican's influence has slipped over the last generation - over that time divisive issues like divorce and abortion have become legal despite strong opposition from the Church - but recent events prove that the Vatican still wields enough power to have a direct impact on the affairs of the Italian state, and under the right circumstances it can even bring down a government.
That the issue that illustrated the point - the plan to give same sex couples some legal rights in the eyes of the state - was able to hijack an essential and poignant issue such as the Afghanistan-NATO vote makes the case even more striking.
"Anyone who believes there is a true separation of Church and State in Italy is not paying attention," one-time Italian parliamentarian and author Gianfranco Rey told ISN Security Watch. "There are many reasons why this kind of truce is less than ideal, but the main one is that it distracts from the business of running a modern democratic state."
The notion of the modern nation independent from both the Holy Roman Empire and the Church dates to 1648, the date of the Peace of Westphalia. That peace ended the Thirty Years' War and created the now-accepted notion of sovereign nation-states that should operate free of control from religious leaders and began the modern era in Europe, starting a chain reaction that led to revolutions in the US, France, across Latin America, and in Russia. But in many ways, having the Vatican so close prevented Italy from following suit and achieving complete sovereignty, as recent events illustrate.
Italy's revolving door of governments proves that politics on the boot-shaped peninsula is inherently unstable, making Italy a less reliable partner internationally and a less effective governor domestically. What is not clear is the extent to which Italy's unique state-within-a-city balancing act is one of the engines keeping that door spinning.
Eric J. Lyman is ISN Security Watch's senior correspondent in Rome.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).
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