Divorce

   In strongly Catholic Italy, the right to divorce was one of the major social and political issues of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The right to legal separation was first proposed in October 1965 by the socialist deputy Loris Fortuna. Fortuna’s bill met fierce resistance from the Church, but, helped by a cross-party pressure group for reform—the “Italian League for the Institution of Divorce”—his ideas gradually won support. In November 1969 a parliamentary coalition of the “lay” parties defeated the opposition of the Democrazia Cristiana/Christian Democracy Party (DC) and the Movimento Sociale Italiano/Italian Social Movement (MSI) by 325 to 283 votes to pass a law that permitted the state, rather than the Church alone, to authorize the dissolution of a marriage. The so-called Legge Fortuna became law in December 1970. Pope Paul VI expressed his “profound regret” for the decision, which the church regarded as a violation of the Lateran pacts. Within six months more than one million Catholics had signed a petition for a referendum abrogating the new divorce law, and, in January 1972, the Constitutional Court declared the proposed referendum legitimate. To avoid a divisive social clash over the issue, in February 1972, the political parties resorted to dissolving Parliament and calling an early general election (which, by law, may not be held concurrently with a referendum) in order to postpone the referendum vote. In 1973, Amintore Fanfani, hoping to make political capital from the issue, turned it into a crusade (he famously warned that homosexual marriage would be legalized if Italians did not turn back the tide of sexual license of which the divorce law was a harbinger). Bowing to the inevitable, president Giovanni Leone called a referendum on the issue in March 1974. The poll, which took place on 12–13 May 1974, illustrated the shift in Italian social mores brought about by the previous two decades of economic growth and social transformation. Some 87 percent of the electorate voted, and a resounding 59.3 percent voted against abrogating the divorce law. Huge numbers of Catholics, taking notice of Pope Paul’s studied moderation during the electoral campaign, either abstained or voted in favor of the Legge Fortuna. The introduction of divorce has not shaken the foundations of the Italian family. While the number of divorces has greatly increased, the percentage of dissolved marriages remains very low by richcountry standards. Moreover, only 6–7 percent of Italian children are born out of wedlock, compared with figures of 30 percent or more for some industrial democracies.

   See also Women.