'Theo-dem', top Vatican hawk on family have meeting of minds

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York

An intriguing meeting took place in the Vatican today between a leading exponent of a political current known as the “theo-dems,” meaning center-left politicians inspired by Catholic values, and the Vatican’s leading hawk on issues of sexuality and the family. The encounter symbolizes two different visions of the church’s engagement in the Western “culture wars” – one moderate and dialogic, the other clear and uncompromising.

Indirectly, the session raises a crucial question, with implications far beyond Italy: To what extent can the more moderate tendency find a “right of citizenship” in a church that in many ways stresses a harder line?

Italy’s Minister of the Family, a 56-year-old devout Catholic politician named Rosy Bindi, met Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, 70, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, in Lopez Trujillo’s Vatican office.

Though no statement was issued after the session, the two almost certainly discussed Bindi’s willingness to entertain proposals for the civil registration of unmarried, “de facto” couples, including same-sex couples, a proposal Lopez and other church officials have strongly opposed.

On most other cultural issues, Bindi and Lopez are in near-perfect harmony. Bindi opposes gay marriage and adoption rights for homosexuals, and has made clear that the government of Romano Prodi has no intention of introducing legislation that would equate same-sex unions with marriage.

“The word ‘pacs’ does not appear in our agenda,” Bindi has said, referring to the French acronym which has become a shorthand reference for civil equivalents of marriage in European discourse. "We speak of civil unions, of guaranteeing rights."

“One can’t think of putting the family founded on marriage and other forms of living together on the same level,” Bindi said, “and not just because the pope says so.”

Yet the fracture between Bindi and Lopez Trujillo on civil unions reflects a wider divergence in Catholic opinion – between those who believe that the state has to make some concession to new social realities in order to protect individual rights, and those who insist that any concession to the dissolution of the traditional family unit invites a slippery slope.

More broadly, some Italian Catholics see figures such as Bindi as a God-send, a way of keeping Catholic values alive in political and cultural circles often hostile to the church. Others, however, see her attempt to reconcile Catholicism with the post-modern political left as an effort to merge matter and anti-matter which the church should reject.

It’s a quandry with which Catholic politicians elsewhere, including Democrats in the United States, can easily identify.

Few politicians anywhere in the world, of any ideological stripe, can stake a better personal claim to Catholic credentials than Bindi.

Born in 1951 in Sinalunga, Bindi attended the University of Siena and quickly became enrolled in Catholic Action, by far the largest and most influential lay organization in Italy. Catholic Action has long been seen as the moderate and “mainstream” lay group in Italian Catholicism, while Communion and Liberation, founded by Fr. Luigi Giussani, is the more conservative alternative.

Bindi says that her life changed on Feb. 19, 1980, when she witnessed the assassination of her mentor, Vittorio Bachelet, by a commander of the Red Brigade terrorist group. Bachelet was a former president of Catholic Action as well as a former vice-president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. Afterwards, Bindi dedicated herself to Bachelet’s project of bringing Catholic values to political life.

As a member of the opposition party under former conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Bindi was a strong opponent of the war in Iraq. After elections last May brought the center-left under Prime Minister Romano Prodi to power, Bindi was selected as Italy’s first-ever “Minister of the Family,” a position which has put her on the front lines of the culture wars.

Bindi has said that she sees the center-left as a “grand common home” for secularists and Catholics alike.

“Look, I appear sometimes as a Catholic of the center-left, which can take positions that are a little critical with regard to the church,” she said. “Now, my being a believer will be put to the test: I’ll have to find a synthesis between my values, and my respect for pluralism and the evolution of society, for different ideas and inclinations.”

Today's meeting suggests the search for that synthesis continues.