Feature Article

Tangled up in politics

The constitutional crisis provoked this week by Silvio Berlusconi's  intervention in a right-to-die case raised a question mark over the Premier's relationship with the Vatican. Eighty years after the Lateran Treaty, just how blurred is the dividing line between the Holy See and the republic of Italy?

Via dell'Umiltà, a cobbled street near the Trevi Fountain in the heart of Rome, is home to three Rome institutions: the Foreign Press Club (Associazione della Stampa Estera); Casa Santa Maria - an historic residence of the North American Pontifical College; and the headquarters of Forza Italia - the party of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The thought that Italy's resident foreign journalists, American priests and its Prime Minister and top media tycoon are all housed in "The Street of Humility" has often struck me as wryly appropriate. What is even more striking, though, is that outside the Forza Italia offices there is a plaque to Don Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959), the Sicilian Catholic priest considered the father of Christian Democracy.

Don Luigi was among the founders of the Italian People's Party (Partito Popolare Italiano, or PPI) in 1919, when it won more than 20 per cent of the vote and 100 seats in Parliament. It was suppressed under the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, with Don Luigi in exile in London - first at the residence of the Oblates of St Charles in Bayswater, later with the Servites at the Priory of St Mary in Fulham Road - and then in the United States. He returned to Italy in 1946, was made Senator for Life in 1953 and died in Rome six years later at the age of 87.

On the face of it, his story has little in common with that of Berlusconi, the self-made billionaire from Milan who made a fortune in property and then television and advertising, entered politics by forming Forza Italia to win elections in 1994, has repeatedly been in legal trouble for alleged corruption (though never definitively convicted) and is best known in the outside world for his gaffes and saloon-bar jokes about women.

But that is not how Berlusconi himself sees it. Now serving his third term as Prime Minister, he reportedly has his eye on the final prize, election as head of state after President Giorgio Napolitano. The gaffes are fewer, replaced by a statesmanlike pose and an emphasis on his long experience. The plaque to Don Luigi in Via dell'Umiltà, erected four years ago, bears an inscription praising his Christian principles and political achievements, with the words, "We feel ourselves to be the continuers of this fascinating human adventure". Signed: Silvio Berlusconi.

Forza Italia, in other words - or as it now calls itself, in an alliance with the right-wing Alleanza Nazionale, "The People of Liberty" (Popolo della Libertà) - considers itself the true heir of Christian Democracy, which imploded in a series of corruption scandals in the early 1990s. There are a number of small Christian Democratic factions, but they wield comparatively little influence - and none of them is in the current centre-Right coalition.

It is Berlusconi who projects himself as a devout pro-life Catholic (albeit a divorced one), who has cultivated close ties with Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican, and who courts the Catholic vote that once went to Don Luigi and the PPI.

So far so good - except that, as far as the Italian secular Left is concerned, it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle Italian politics from the Vatican. The row over Berlusconi's last-minute intervention to try to save the life of Eluana Englaro, the 38-year-old Italian woman in a coma for 17 years who this week died when her feeding tubes were withdrawn and replaced with sedative lines, was believed to have happened after a call from Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state. The case became not only a constitutional crisis

over Berlusconi's use of an emergency decree to defy both the courts and the head of state, but also a test case over whether the Vatican is dictating Italian policy on issues from euthanasia to birth control and homosexuality.

On paper, the situation is clear enough. Since the 1929 Lateran Pact between the Holy See and the Mussolini regime, the Vatican has been a sovereign state with no role in the affairs of its Italian neighbour (and vice versa). The reality is not so clear-cut. When you step from Via della Conciliazione to St Peter's Square you are stepping from one state to another, but the line is as difficult to discern as that between, say, the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) and the Vatican Curia.

Again, the difference is clear on paper. If Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the Archbishop of Genoa and head of the CEI, speaks out against euthanasia, he is not speaking on behalf of the Vatican but of Italian Catholicism. Avvenire, the Italian bishops' newspaper, is not a Vatican organ. But the Vatican, although a global institution, is also an Italian one: its working language is Italian, most of its staff are Italian, and so are its mouthpieces, including the papal spokesman.

Since the 1984 revision of the Concordat between Italy and the Holy See - part of the Lateran Pact - Catholicism is no longer the state religion. But in exchange an income tax provides contributions from public funds to the Catholic Church, in addition to existing tax exemptions for Vatican properties, extended by Berlusconi in 2005.

The Pope's Angelus address on Sunday is broadcast live on RAI, Italian state television, and his pronouncements feature prominently in Italian news bulletins. The Pope may be German, but Cardinal Bertone, the genial and astute secretary of state, was formerly Archbishop of Genoa. The Vatican has denied reports that Cardinal Bertone triggered the crisis over Eluana Englaro by phoning Berlusconi, a fellow Italian, and imploring him to "prevent this crime against humanity".

But something triggered it. Eluana's father, Beppino, says he wrote to Berlusconi in 2004 pleading for a political and legislative solution to clarify Eluana's case. Berlusconi's office denies receiving such a letter, although Englaro has produced a receipt of delivery. The Supreme Court gave Eluana's father the go-ahead to let her die last September, with no reaction from Berlusconi at the time.

So why did the Prime Minister step in? For the Left, the answer is that he used the Englaro case as a pretext to rule in an increasingly authoritarian way, brushing aside the courts and bypassing Parliament, as Mussolini did. "Berlusconi has mounted a Bonapartist coup," said Umberto Eco, the writer. Massimo D'Alema, a former centre-Left prime minister, said Berlusconi was acting "like a bully".

But for secular, liberal politicians such as Emma Bonino, the former European Union Commissioner, the explanation is not just authoritarianism but Vatican pressure. "The Pope interferes in Italian affairs every single day," she says. Two years ago the Vatican backed a rally at St John Lateran by tens of thousands of "pro-family" demonstrators in Rome protesting against proposed laws giving limited legal rights to homosexual couples (they were dropped).

Four years ago, faced with a referendum relaxing legal limits on assisted fertility, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, then head of the CEI and Vicar of Rome, urged Italian Catholics not to vote so it would fail for lack of a quorum (it did). The Church has intervened on embryology, the RU-486 morning-after pill, volunteers in family planning centres, drug and alcohol use, and speed limits.

Allegations of "clerical dictatorship" or "theocracy" are wide of the mark. We have after all been here before. Divorce was legalised in Italy in 1974, and abortion in 1978, despite vociferous objections from the Vatican and the Catholic Church. When John Paul II in 2002 called on Italian Catholic lawyers to boycott divorce cases, nearly 90 per cent of Italians rejected this, with Corriere della Sera saying "with all due respect to a great Pope, his appeal for conscientious objection against divorce can be compared to the Taliban in Afghanistan".

Mr Berlusconi believes he represented "the feelings of most Italians" over the decision to withdraw water and nutrients from Eluana and let her die. Opinion polls, however, suggest that Italians were divided, with 47 per cent in favour of Ms Englaro's "right to die", 47 per cent against, and 6 per cent undecided. Although euthanasia is illegal in Italy, "refusing treatment" is not, and Beppino Englaro and Eluana's friends testified she told them she would not want to be kept alive artificially if she were ever in a coma.

Even the former Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, said terminally ill patients should be given the right to refuse treatment. Cardinal Martini, who has Parkinson's disease, said he opposed active euthanasia, but opposed "unreasonably obstinate" treatments that keep the terminally ill alive.

As for Eluana Englaro, the Vatican remains firm. "May God forgive them," a senior Vatican official said as the news that she had died came through. But Senator Giulio Andreotti, who recently turned 90, was seven times a Christian Democrat prime minister and is as close to the Vatican as an Italian politician can be, said "the Calvary of Eluana" should never have been a political issue.

"We are dealing with a family which has been heavily tested by a tragedy, and no one can arrogate the right to decide it imperiously," he said. A rebuke, it seems, to Silvio Berlusconi. What Don Luigi Sturzo would have made of it we can only guess.