Papers by Rosario Forlenza
Oxford University Press eBooks, May 9, 2024
Oxford University Press eBooks, May 9, 2024
Oxford University Press eBooks, May 9, 2024
Modern Italy, Apr 26, 2024
Politics and religion, Apr 2, 2024
This article deals with the transformation of Catholic politics in Italy between 1942 and 1945 an... more This article deals with the transformation of Catholic politics in Italy between 1942 and 1945 and the emergence of Christian Democracy as the dominant political party in the postwar years. It analyzes how Catholic politicians turned from reactionary critics of democracy to its champion. The article foregrounds a dimension that has not been given sufficient attention in scholarly works on political Catholicism and Christian Democracy, namely the religious content of thought. In the experiences of politicians and thinkers living through Fascism and war, transcendence and spirituality emerged as new markers of certainty that came to redirect and ground democracy. Our conceptual argument is that Christian Democracy can be understood as a distinct form of "political spirituality," pace Foucault. The article further shows how this political spirituality became "applied" in a series of ways in the immediate postwar period.
Politics and religion, Apr 2, 2024
This article deals with the transformation of Catholic politics in Italy between 1942 and 1945 an... more This article deals with the transformation of Catholic politics in Italy between 1942 and 1945 and the emergence of Christian Democracy as the dominant political party in the postwar years. It analyzes how Catholic politicians turned from reactionary critics of democracy to its champion. The article foregrounds a dimension that has not been given sufficient attention in scholarly works on political Catholicism and Christian Democracy, namely the religious content of thought. In the experiences of politicians and thinkers living through Fascism and war, transcendence and spirituality emerged as new markers of certainty that came to redirect and ground democracy. Our conceptual argument is that Christian Democracy can be understood as a distinct form of "political spirituality," pace Foucault. The article further shows how this political spirituality became "applied" in a series of ways in the immediate postwar period.
Oxford University Press eBooks, May 9, 2024
Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, 2016
The paper deals with the way the Church is facing the challenge of sexual modernization. This str... more The paper deals with the way the Church is facing the challenge of sexual modernization. This struggle, we argue, not only involves the orthodoxy of Church teaching on human society but also will contribute to define Francis' papacy and the future of the Catholic Church. In this vein, the struggle with sexual modernization might be «the last frontier», the final dividing line between the universal Church and denominationalism. While the Protestant denominations have largely adjusted to and compromised with secular society in terms of accepting individualism and sexual modernization, the Church has instead defended the traditional views on marriage and sexuality. To accept homosexuality and same-sex marriage would be in effect the protestantization of Catholicism thereby becoming a denomination rather than a universal Church
22nd International Conference of Europeanists, Jul 9, 2015
Oxford University Press eBooks, Nov 22, 2018
This chapter deals with the growing influence of both Soviet and domestic Communism on the evolut... more This chapter deals with the growing influence of both Soviet and domestic Communism on the evolution of democracy and the political transformation of Italy. It inserts the political and existential choices of the fledgling democratic society into the overarching context of the time, which was the incipient Cold War. Italy was a microcosm of this global context, because the most important political forces, the Catholics and the Communists, operated with the myth of freedom/America and the myth of the Soviet Union respectively. Yet the struggle was not exclusively pervaded and marked by contrast, fear, and opposition. Party political opponents had fought together in the anti-fascist Resistance and had collaborated in the organization of the democratic institutional arrangement and in the writing of the republican Constitution. The apparently ideological struggle between Catholics and communists was in reality a search for order and meaning between two contested sovereignties.
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Papers by Rosario Forlenza