Rosario Forlenza (Columbia University), Secularization from Within: Political Catholicism in Perspective

When

May 13, 2015    
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Where

Committee for the Study of Religion
365 5th Ave. Room 5307, New York, NY

Event Type

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Using the Italian case as a springboard, this paper discusses how Catholicism related to modernity and democracy, tracing continuities and changes in the tensions between religion and secularity throughout the twentieth century. At a general level, Catholicism went through a process of transformation which developed from radical rejection of modernity to hesitant embracement and, finally, critical co-articulation of the modern project.

The Italian case is analyzed as emblematic for the larger European historical and political context, as Christian Democracy became the central forum for institutionalizing a link between Christianity and modern state politics. To some degree this development served to overcome the Catholic-Protestant divide, and also therefore played a significant role in the formation of the European Community.  Christian Democracy articulated a political-institutional, cultural, and socio-economic platform in the transition to and consolidation of democracy. It implemented a Christian-inspired version of welfare state policies as a specific response to the challenge of post-fascist, modern mass democracy.

At the theoretical level, the paper discusses how sets of religious ideas can be adapted to national and European politics in particular historical circumstances, thereby giving direction to multiple pathways towards the modern. Addressing more directly the conference theme, in this context the paper discusses how the success of Christian Democracy can in fact be seen as a crucial vector for a larger process of secularization—a process that happened from within political Catholicism, e.g. from within a religious realm of thought and practice, and not against it.

Bio:

Rosario Forlenza is a Research Fellow at the Blinken European Institute, Columbia University, and a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Padua. He is a historian of modern Europe and twentieth century Italy whose main fields of expertise are political anthropology, symbolic and cultural politics, politics and religion, cinema and propaganda, the politics of memory, democracy and democratization. He has worked at the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and New York University. He has written two books, and his articles have appeared in Modern Italy, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, International Political Anthropology, History&Memory, Contemporary European History, Journal of Cold War Studies. He is working on a manuscript on the birth of democracy in Italy after World War II and, with Bjørn Thomassen, on a volume titled Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rosario Forlenza is a Research Fellow at the Blinken European Institute, Columbia University, and a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Padua. He is a historian of modern Europe and twentieth century Italy whose main fields of expertise are political anthropology, symbolic and cultural politics, politics and religion, cinema and propaganda, the politics of memory, democracy and democratization. He has worked at the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and New York University. He has written two books, and his articles have appeared in Modern Italy, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, International Political Anthropology, History&Memory, Contemporary European History, Journal of Cold War Studies. He is working on a manuscript on the birth of democracy in Italy after World War II and, with Bjørn Thomassen, on a volume titled Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan).

 

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