The Catholic Religion and the Italian Communist Party

di Lorenzo Ettorre
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 48 (2015), p. 143

The article analyses the attention and the interest the Italian Communist Party showed towards the Catholic religion, from 1944 to 1954. The considered diachronic development – intentionally widened to a ten years period – enabled an overall view of the Communist attitude towards the Catholics and let interruptions and continuities appear. Among them, the last ones prevailed. The Turning Point inaugurated by Togliatti in Salerno, in fact – although conditioned by the Cold War national and International changes, that accelerated or slowed it according to the occasions – could be considered irrevocable, laying the basis for the following years Communist politics, culminating, after two decades, in the “Historic compromise”. Keywords: Communist Party, Christian Democracy, Chatolicism, Catholic question in the Italian Communist Party, Togliatti, De Gasperi.