Premier Romano Prodi promised Monday to promote dialogue with the Vatican after churchmen were alarmed by the government's proposal to grant legal rights to same-sex partners and unmarried heterosexual couples.Prodi was scheduled to review church-state relations later Monday in a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI's top aide, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and with Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the politically influential head of the Italian bishops conference.
The occasion was the annual Italian-Vatican meeting to mark the anniversary of the 1929 pact governing relations between the two sides.
"We will reaffirm the seriousness, the dialogue and the collaboration between the Holy See and the Italian state," Prodi said in remarks on state TV.
"And we'll reaffirm it, having dialogue on the most important problems that we face," the premier said.
"We'll have a dialogue on the subject of the family and also on the proposed law," Prodi said, referring to the plan to grant many legal rights to unmarried couples living together.
The proposed law, heavily lobbied for by Communists in Prodi's center-left coalition, has alarmed the Vatican. The pope has said he is worried about family identity, and the Italian bishops' conference has been campaigning vehemently against the plan.
If the proposal becomes law, unmarried couples would acquire inheritance rights after nine years of living together and would be granted other rights sooner, such as deciding medical treatment should a partner become incapacitated.
The 1929 Lateran Pact, signed by Pope Pius XI and Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, gave the Roman Catholic Church many privileges. It also aligned Italian law with church teaching, including declaring that marriage could not be dissolved.
Italy legalized divorce decades later.
In 1984, the Vatican and the Italian government then led by Socialist Premier Bettino Craxi agreed to a revised pact that eliminated Roman Catholicism as Italy's state religion.
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