Silently and cautiously, the Vatican is trying to distance itself from Silvio Berlusconi.
It won't be easy.
For more than 15 years, the current Italian prime
minister was an inevitable partner of the Catholic church: the leader of
a strong parliamentary majority, and a public defender of moral values,
although his private behaviour has been, to put it fairly, a
contradictory one.
But now that the economic crisis is biting Italian
society, the Holy See is trying to look elsewhere to find new
politicians – and to show that its ties with Berlusconi are not as
strong as many observers have supposed.
But why did the
Vatican support, or anyway fail to oppose Berlusconi in the past? There
are a number of political and historic reasons. First of all: the "Cavaliere",
as he is nicknamed, did not owe anything to the Vatican.
In 1994, he
won his first elections despite the Vatican and Italian bishops, who
supported the Popular party.
The Catholic church undervalued his
strength, and then assumed that he was just a meteor on the Italian
horizon. And eventually tried, with quite a controversial result, to
"convert" him.
Berlusconi was about to become the new hinge
of the political system, in a country emancipated from the ghosts of
the cold war – and from the Vatican's electoral influence.
Secularised
voters no longer felt they had to reward Christian Democrats to avoid
the victory of communism.
But they didn't shift to the left: they turned
right, towards Berlusconi, surprising the Italian bishops as well.
They
confirmed an unwritten principle: the ideological adversary of
Christian Democracy was the left but the real competitor was a "silent
majority" of conservative voters, now keen to express freely their true
preferences.
Since then, the problem for the Vatican has
been to find a new pro-church coalition at least to resist a secular
transformation of the country, as happened in José Zapatero's Spain.
Berlusconi posed as a defender of Christian values.
His private
behaviour was definitely considered by the Holy See as a bagatelle,
compared with the attitude of the left, which was viewed as a
hyper-secularised adversary.
True or not, this perception allowed
Berlusconi to define himself as the "Christian leader" of Italy and of
moderate voters.
That explains why, when later scandals emerged about
his alleged relations with young women and suspected prostitutes, the
Vatican was surprisingly silent.
Italian bishops spoke out, using cautious words
to criticise Berlusconi's way of life. The assumption – and for some
Catholic circles the alibi – was that there was and is no political
alternative to his coalition. Quite true: in the last few years, the
weakness of the Italian left has been the major ally to the "Cavaliere".
But now his star is burning out.
In May he lost regional elections. And
the economic crisis, poorly undervalued and dismissed by his government
for a long time, shatters his credibility and, worse, risks to tear
Italian society apart.
That's why Italian bishops are trying to distance
themselves from him, although not from the centre-right majority.
They
still expect a transition to a post-Berlusconi era; and a new political
class due to emerge from a "Catholic civil society" of sorts.
But the
Cavaliere is a master of survival.
Although his decline is obvious and
palpable, he will fight.
He knows that anyone betting on his political
end, including portions of the Catholic church, has no alternative
solution at hand.
Berlusconi shaped not only his coalition, but the
whole Italian political system.
Today's Vatican is, if not
an associate to his power network, an institution unready to offer a new
model for Italy's recovery; and, furthermore, internally split.
So far
the Catholic church has proved to be part of the Italian crisis.
Its
valuable and strong defence of national unity and its tireless calls to
restore moral values don't suffice to reverse this impression.
So, the
search for new political leaders is destined to expose the Catholic
hierarchy to growing inner tensions.
Getting rid of Berlusconi will not
be easy even for the Vatican.