Church intervention in plans to legalise same-sex unions sparks sinister passionsFrom Philip Willan in RomeLAST WEEK Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco celebrated mass in Genoa's cathedral flanked by two police bodyguards.
The liturgical innovation - with plain-clothed guards replacing more customary altar boys or deacons - was a response to the death threats received by the president of the Italian bishops' conference.
The threats began last month following Bagnasco's publicly stated opposition to government plans to legalise same-sex unions and they reveal the extraordinary passions aroused by the Catholic Church's involvement in Italy's political debate.
A statement from the bishops' conference reminding Catholic parliamentarians of their moral obligation to toe the Church line was seen by many as an unwarranted interference in the democratic process of a supposedly secular state.
But even the archbishop's fiercest critics were taken aback when threatening messages signed with the five-pointed star of the Red Brigades terror organisation were scrawled on the city's walls. And the level of alarm increased again more recently when the senior prelate received a bullet in the post.
The reality of the menace is hard to gauge. The Red Brigades have shown themselves capable of assassinating senior public figures in recent years and 15 alleged members of the group were arrested in Italy only three months ago.
Yet there is no way of knowing whether the anti-Bagnasco messages that contained their symbol were actually connected to the revolutionary group. The bullet sent through the post was a relic of the second world war.
It was accompanied by a newspaper photo of the archbishop, on which someone had drawn a swastika in felt pen, and an illiterate message. Police concluded that its author was probably not connected to a real terrorist group.
The putative connection between terrorism and criticism of the Church emerged again last week following an anti-clerical diatribe by a comedian at a rock concert organised in Rome by the main trade unions to mark Labour Day.
Singer-satirist Andrea Rivera joked to the huge crowd gathered outside the Basilica of St John the Lateran that it was understandable that the Pope disagreed with the theory of evolution, since the Church itself had not evolved in 2000 years.
Rivera also said he was indignant that the Church gave a Catholic burial to dictators such as Pinochet in Chile and Franco in Spain but denied it to an Italian muscular dystrophy sufferer who insisted on his right to die.
The Church's reasoning is that even the worst human rights abuser can repent on their death-bed, while the person bent on suicide is defying a fundamental Catholic teaching to the last.
The Vatican was not amused. The attack on the Church was tantamount to terrorism, the semi-official Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano responded the next day.
"It's terrorism to feed blind and irrational furies against those who speak only in the name of love, love for life and love for man," the paper said.
"It's cowardly and terroristic to throw stones at the Pope himself, feeling protected by the cries of approval of an easily excitable crowd."
The Vatican's reaction divided public opinion once again, with left-wing politicians censuring the newspaper for having lost all sense of proportion, while their right-wing opponents said Rivera's attack on the Church showed that democracy itself was in danger.
The political activism of the Catholic hierarchy seems to indicate that the Church is unwilling to give up the significant vestiges of temporal power that it still manages to retain in Italy.
Members of the Christian Democrat diaspora are now scattered throughout the political spectrum, giving the Catholic Church an unusual political leverage in a political system split neatly down the middle.
The current battle over civil unions, which the Church says will undermine the moral fibre of the nation, has been likened to that over divorce in 1974.
Then the Christian Democrat Party's unsuccessful campaign to erase divorce from the statute book was partly financed by Michele Sindona, a mafia-linked financier who committed suicide in prison after being convicted of bankruptcy and murder.
The current battle will reach a new peak on Saturday, when the rival camps hold mass rallies in Rome.
Opponents of Vatican "interference" in Italian political life will gather in Piazza Navona for a kind of "lay pride".
Across the city Catholics will be gathering for a "Family Day" rally, as luck would have it, in the same field outside the Basilica of St John the Lateran, where the comic Rivera delivered his anti-Vatican harangue last Tuesday.
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