Vito Breda (Cardiff Law School & Australian National University) has posted Sharia Law in Catholic Italy: A Non-Agnostic Model of Accommodation. The abstract follows.
The Italian Constitution and its interpretation by the Constitutional Court have led to the development of a model of accommodation of religious practices that seeks to balance a commitment to promoting religious pluralism whilst, at the same time, maintaining the neutrality of state institutions. What is distinctive about this quasi-neutral constitutional stance is the commitment to reducing the discrepancies between the legal and religious effects of key life decisions (e.g. the decision to get married). I call this stance positive secularism. In this essay, I would like to show that, thus far, positive secularism has been particularly effective in accommodating the demands of Muslim immigrants (Pacini 2001). For instance, some aspects of the Sharia law, such as marriage (including some effects of polygamous marriage) and divorce (including some effects of unilateral divorce), are already recognized by Italian international private law. The second stage for the accommodation of Sharia law in Italy is likely to be the recognition of Islam as one of Italy’s official religions. Recognition will increase the level of the Islamic communities’ autonomy and will allow for the automatic recognition of some aspects of Sharia law. In February 2010, the Italian government established the Committee for Islam, composed of representatives of Italian Islamic communities, within the Ministry of Interior Affairs. In the recent past, these types of dialogues between institutions and religious representatives have been the proxy for the official recognition of nine faiths in Italy. Waldensian Evangelical Church, the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, the Evangelical Baptist Church, the Lutheran Baptist Church, the Apostolic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, the Adventist Church, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Italy, Hebrew Communities of Italy. The chapter is divided into two sections, which is preceded by an introduction, and followed by a conclusion. The first section will discuss the judicial introduction of Sharia law via the procedure of Italian international law. The second section will explain the advantages of the recognition process and the reasons that have prevented Islamic communities from benefiting from it.
Mario Draghi, Catholic Social Doctrine, and the Euro Crisis
The European sovereign debt crisis is far from over and it is, as recent Italian elections have shown, at the center of European political debates. One of the main actors in the crisis has been the European Central Bank under the leadership of the Italian President Mario Draghi.
On February 27, Draghi gave an important speech at the Katholische Akademie in Bayern (Germany). The speech may be interesting for those studying the relationships among Catholic Social Doctrine, economics, and public policy. In the speech, Draghi reminds listeners how important it is not to separate economic from moral concerns and stresses that: “Ultimately, we must be guided by a higher moral standard and a profound belief in creating an economic order that serves every person.” He quotes Cardinal Reinhard Marx: “the economy is not an end in itself, but is in the service of all mankind”. According to Draghi, one of the central mechanisms to manage the current crisis is subsidiarity: the shared responsibility and mutual support between the EU supranational level and the different member states. For Draghi: “Catholic Social doctrine makes absolutely clear that subsidiarity has to be paired with support. But what binds these together is trust.” In sum, it is a speech worth reading to understand the euro-crisis from a Catholic Social Doctrine perspective.
The speech is available here.
→ Leave a comment
Posted in CLR Forum Guest, Commentary, Pasquale Annicchino, Uncategorized
Tagged Catholic Social Teaching, Catholicism, Italy, Religion and Economics, Religion in Europe