Family Day, Lay Courage, Gay Pride: Italians in 2007 are faced with church intervention in Italian politics and society as a whole, and it's one demonstration after the other, for or against the Vatican and its political supporters in parliament.Does the Vatican - which is housed in the centre of Rome and thus has some special relationship with Italy as a whole - have the right to influence Italian politics, or should religion stay out of civil causes?
Italian Catholics provocatively chose May 12, the anniversary of the radical party referendum which passed the divorce law in Italy in 1974 in spite of the Vatican's opposition, to hold the huge Family Day demonstration. One million people gathered in Piazza San Giovanni, Rome.
On the same day laymen and laywomen held Lay Courage, a much smaller counter-demonstration in Piazza Navona in favour of recognising "de-facto" unions (heterosexual unmarried couples) and gay couples' rights (so-called "Dico").
But the big appointment for gay rights will be the upcoming Gay Pride demonstration, due to take place on May 27, which will be joined also by all sorts of lay heterosexuals who criticise the church.
"Piazze contro" was the headline of lay editorialist Michele Ainis for La Stampa on May 12: "Between Catholic pride and Lay Courage, it seems to be forbidden to be both for Dicos and for the traditional family at the same time," comments Ainis.
The irony of two counter-demonstrations is all in the story of the Craxi siblings (son Bobo and daughter Stefania of Bettino Craxi, the ex-socialist premier at the centre of the 90s Tangentopoli scandal, who died exiled in Hammamet, Tunisia), who chose to demonstrate in opposite camps: proof that bringing the family on to the streets doesn't do much good to the family.
And never mind families and gay people: what about the rights of Italian singles, which seem to number more than 10 million nowadays and are paying triple the taxes of those who have children?
La Stampa editorialist Barbara Spinelli, who lives in Paris, expressed her position as pro Lay Courage: "Family Day was a church-upheld demonstration to defend a private interest, putting so-called normal families and so-called abnormal unions in competition against each other: families which believe in some supposed 'natural' right and unions without any rights at all.
On the other hand in Piazza Navona lays and Catholics alike asked for rights for everybody, married people and Dico: they were fewer, because they didn't have the organisational power of the Catholic associations. But they testified a strong and ancient tradition as well".
Politics should be independent and it's unfortunate that the Democratic party about to be founded by the left isn't able to agree on such a basic point, argues Spinelli.
On the other hand, the Italian right is similar to the French right wing: they use religion and clergy when they invoke the return to a strong authority and a natural order. They proclaim, as did Berlusconi on Family Day, that "a catholic can't be leftwing".
The debate on nature against culture, natural law against positive law, is a trap for the legislator.
The family is not a natural right: it is born from tradition, not from nature. And marriage is a sacrament that was started in the 13th century - it isn't written about in the Bible and it isn't shared by all Christians.
When, in the name of nature and of the marriage sacrament citizens are incited to disobey to the law, "the church becomes an element of confusion and, in fact, subversive," wrote Gustavo Zagrebelsky in his editorial, The false answers of natural laws, on La Repubblica.
The divisions in the Italian government and the way in which the clergy takes advantage of them has obscured what is happening in our society. That is also what brought Italy - after 10 other European countries - to legislate on de-facto unions.
It isn't an extension of modern evil, relativism and hedonism, as the Vatican wants us to believe.
What citizens are living through is a profound crisis of the family as an institution. That's also why de-facto unions are increasing: in a society where work is precarious, homes are hard to find, kids have no money and are forced to live with their parents, there is thirst for laws that recognise and give strength to experimental unions.
As Barbara Spinelli says: "There is a quest for rights but also for duties: for example the duty not to abandon a sick friend alone in the hospital, or to donate an inheritance to them. To say that standing by your partner destroys the classical family is very cruel. Marriage falls apart on its own, not due to those who think, live, love, and die in a different condition."
However, this kind of reasoning isn't even considered by the Vatican, which is more old-fashioned now than ever in the modern past, and Italians are torn: obey our Catholic roots, or disobey? It's the dilemma of Italian Catholic gay philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who has never been so visible in the media (TV talk shows, radio and articles in the press) as lately.
Vattimo disobeys, but he is very sad to be forced to do so.
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