Political Catholicism and the Church after the Second Vatican Council

The crisis of the political unity of Catholics and the Christian Democracy decline are just some of the effects of the Second Vatican Council on the transformation of the Italian political system. A huge historiography, especially since the 1990s, analyzes the long-term consequences of the conciliar Aggiornamento, which has redefined the boundaries and the contents of Catholic political geography. Above all historians reflect on the continuities/discontinuities between the social and evangelizing demands of Montini’s pontificate and the claims-based identity of the wojtyłian project faced with the dissolution of the religious presence within the fluid relationships of postmodernity, devoid of form and always unstable. The reorganization of Cei, the end of "collateralism", the new ecclesial movements, dissent, the centrifugal thrusts in the left-wing of the DC and the dogmatic and neo-intransigent impulses in its right-wing: these topics are the focus of the historiographical debate. Starting from the Second Vatican Council, following the disappearance of Catholic centrality in republican life and the disappearance of the twentieth-century party form, political Catholicism is still facing with the great, often unresolved challenges of the Catholic question in the contemporary world, such as the relations between the Church and the nation, as well as those between religion and democracy.

Keywords: Second Vatican Council, Christian Democracy, dissent, Paul VI, John Paul II, ecclesial movements

Marialuisa Lucia Sergio, Il cattolicesimo politico e la Chiesa dopo il Concilio Vaticano II in "MONDO CONTEMPORANEO" 2-3/2018, pp 155-167, DOI: 10.3280/MON2018-002013