Antonio Gramsci

Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Concordats and Church-State Relations

42 The Concordat

In his book Esame critico degli ordini rappresentativi [A Critical Examination of the Representative Orders], Fr L. Taparelli defines concordats as `... conventions between two authorities governing the same Catholic nation'. ⁷³ When a convention is agreed, at least equal juridical importance is attached to the interpretations of the convention itself by the two signatories.

43 Nature of the Concordats

Pius XI writes in his letter to Cardinal Gasparri of 30 May 1930: `There are present even in the Concordat, if not two states, most certainly two totally complete sovereignties, each in other words fully perfect within its own order, which is determined in essence by its respective end, where it is hardly necessary to add that the objective dignity of the ends determines no less objectively and necessarily the absolute superiority of the Church.'

This defines the Church's terrain: in having accepted two separate instruments, the Treaty and the Concordat, for [defining] the relations between state and Church, one has of necessity accepted the terrain that the Treaty defines this relation between two states and the Concordat the relations between two sovereignties within the `same state'. In other words two equal sovereignties are admitted within the same state since they negotiate on the same footing (each within its own order). Of course even the Church maintains there is no confusion of sovereignties, but does so by arguing that the state is not competent to exercise sovereignty in the `spiritual' and if the state does arrogate this function to itself, it usurps its powers. Moreover, even the Church maintains there can be no dual sovereignty in the same order of ends, doing so exactly because it argues that the ends are distinct and declares itself sole sovereign on the spiritual terrain.

Q5§71.

44 State-Church Relations [1]

The Vorwaerts of 14 June 1929, in an article on the concordat between the Vatican City and Prussia, writes that `Rome has maintained that it (the antecedent legislation which previously constituted a de facto concordat) has lapsed in the wake of the political changes that have come about in Germany.' The admission, or rather the assertion, of this principle, on the initiative of the Vatican itself, may be quite far-reaching and contain a considerable number of political consequences.

The Prussian Finance Minister Hoepker-Aschoff, writing in the Vossische Zeitung of 18 June 1929, posed the same problem: `Likewise, it is impossible not to recognise the firm foundation of Rome's argument that, taking into account the many political and territorial changes that have occurred, the agreements entered into should be adapted to meet the new circumstances.' In the same article, Hoepker-Aschoff recalls that `the Prussian state had always maintained that the agreements of 1821 were still in force'. It appears that, for the Vatican, the war of 1870, with its territorial and political modifications (increases in the size of Prussia, constitution of the German Empire under Prussian hegemony) and the Kulturkampf ⁷⁴ period did not constitute `modifications' such as to create `new circumstances', while those modifications brought about after the Great War were essential. Evidently, the juridical thought of the Vatican has undergone change and could still change according to political convenience.

`With 1918, one saw an extremely important innovation in our law, an innovation which, strangely, (but in 1918 there was press censorship!) passed by quite unnoticed -- the state once again began to subsidise the Catholic religion, thus abandoning after 63 years Cavour's principle that lay at the base of the Sardinian law of 29 May 1855: the state must not subsidise any religion.' A. C. Jemolo in the article `State Religion and Permitted Creeds' in Nuovi Studi di Diritto, Economia, Politica, 1930, p. 30. The innovation was introduced by the (Delegated) Decree Laws of 17 March 1918, no. 396, and 9 May 1918, no. 655. On this subject, Jemolo refers the reader to the note by D. Schiappoli, `The Recent Economic Measures in Favour of the Clergy', Naples 1922, from Vol. XLVIII of the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Political and Moral Sciences of Naples.

45 Concordats and International Treaties

The capitulation of the modern state that has happened with the concordats is being masked by a verbal identification of concordats and international treaties. But a concordat is not a common international treaty. In a concordat, a de facto interference in sovereignty in just one state territory is produced, since all the articles of a concordat refer to the citizens of only one of the contracting states, over whom the sovereign power of a foreign state justifies and claims rights and powers of jurisdiction (albeit a special given sort of jurisdiction). What powers has the Reich acquired over the Vatican City by reason of the recent Concordat? And again, the foundatino of the Vatican City gives a semblance of legitimacy to the juridical fiction that the concordat is a common bilateral international treaty. Yet concordats were stipulated even before the Vatican City existed, which means that territory is not an essential factor for papal authority (at least from this point of view). It is only a semblance, though, since while the concordat limits the state authority of one of the contracting parties in its own territory, and influences and determines its legislation and administration, no limitation is mentioned in regard to the territory of the other party: if a limitation does exist for this second party, it refers to the activity undertaken within the territory of the first state, both by citizens of the Vatican City and by citizens of the other state who have themselves represented by the Vatican City. The concordat is therefore the explicit recognition of a dual sovereignty in just one state territory. Certainly it is not a question of the same form of supranational sovereignty (suzeraineté), as was formally recognised as the pope's in the Middle Ages and right up to the absolute monarchies and in a different form afterwards, up to 1848, but, as a compromise, it does necessarily derive from this. Moreover, even when the papacy and its supranational power were at their height, things did not always go very smoothly; papal supremacy, even if recognised juridically, in fact was often most bitterly contested and, looking at it in the most favourable light, it was reduced to the political, economic and fiscal privileges of the episcopacy in each single country.

The concordats attack the nature of the autonomy of the modern state's sovereignty in its essence. Does the state get anything in return? Certainly, but it obtains it within its own territory in respect of its own citizens. The state (and in this case it would be better to say the government) maintains that the Church should not hinder the exercise of power but should, rather, favour and support it just like a crutch supports an invalid. In other words, vis-à-vis a constituted form of government (constituted externally, as is documented by the concordat itself) the Church pledges itself to promote the consent of one part of the ruled which the state explicitly recognises that it cannot obtain by its own means. Herein lies the capitulation by the state, since it in fact accepts the tutelage of an external sovereignty whose superiority is in practice recognised. The very word `concordat' is symptomatic. The articles published in Nuovi Studi on the Concordat are among the most interesting and lend themselves most easily to refutation. (Recall the `treaty' forced upon the Georgian democratic republic after General Denikin's defeat. ⁷⁵)

But even in the modern world, what is the practical meaning of the situation created in a state by the stipulation of a concordat? It means the public recognition of a caste of citizens of the same state having certain political privileges. The form is no longer the medieval one, but the substance is the same. In the development of modern history, this caste had seen the monopoly of the social role that explained and justified its existence -- the monopoly over culture and education -- attacked and destroyed. The concordat recognises this monopoly afresh, even though it is attenuated and subject to checks, since it ensures that the caste has preliminary positions and conditions which it could not have and maintain solely through its own strength and through the intrinsic harmony between its conception of the world and actual reality.

One can thus understand the secretive, sordid struggle of the secular and secularising intellectuals against the caste-intellectuals in order to safeguard their autonomy and role. But it cannot be denied that, inwardly, they have given up the struggle and become detached from the state. The ethical nature of a concrete state, of a particular state, is defined by its effective legislation and not by the polemics of the irregular forces of the world of culture. If these latter claim that they are the state, they are only asserting that the so-called unitary state is just that -- `so-called' -- because in reality, right at its heart, there is a very serious split, all the more serious in so far as it is tacitly affirmed by the legislators and rulers themselves when they say that this unitary state is in actual fact two states simultaneously: one of these corresponds to the laws as written and applied in practice and the other to those individual consciences which inwardly do not recognise those laws as producing the effect wanted and are thus engaged in a sordid attempt to empty them of their ethical content (or at least try to limit their applicability). This is just the Machiavellianism of small-time political operators; the philosophers of actual idealism, especially the talking-parrot section of Nuovi Studi may be said to be the most illustrious victims of Machiavellianism.

It is useful to study the division of labour that it is being sought to establish between caste and secular intellectuals. ⁷⁶ The former have been left the task of the intellectual and moral training of the very young (primary and lower secondary schools) while the latter take charge of the further development of young people at university. But university schooling is not subject to the same monopoly regime which, on the other hand, underlies primary and secondary schools. There exists the University of the Sacred Heart and it will now be possible to create other Catholic universities having equivalent status in everything with the state universities. ⁷⁷ The consequences are obvious: the primary and secondary schools constitute the schools for the petty bourgeoisie and popular classes -- social strata which are monopolised, educationally speaking, by the caste -- because the majority of their members do not go on to university, that is to say they will not come into contact with modern education at its higher critical-historical level but will know only a dogmatic education. The university is the school for the ruling class (and personnel) in its own right, the mechanism by which there takes place the selection of individuals of other classes who are to be incorporated into the ruling, administrative and government personnel. But with the existence on equal terms of Catholic universities, even the training of this personnel will no longer be homogeneous or take place in a unified fashion. Not only this, but the caste, within its own universities, will bring about such a concentration of religious and secular culture (cultura laico-religiosa) as has not been seen for many a long year and will in fact find itself in much better conditions than the state-secular concentration (concentrazione laico-statale), given the fact that the efficiency of the Church, which acts in its entirety as a bloc in support of its own university, far out-distances the organisational efficiency of secular culture. If the state (even in its wider sense of civil society) does not express itself in the form of a cultural organisation according to a centralised plan and if it cannot even do so, because its legislation on religious questions is what it is and its ambiguity cannot but favour the Church, given the massive structure of the latter and the relative and absolute weight which is expressed by such a homogeneous structure, and if, further, the degrees awarded by the two types of university are of equal status, it is obvious that a tendency will be created for the Catholic universities to be the selection mechanism for the insertion of the most intelligent and capable members of the lower classes into the ruling personnel. The factors favouring this tendency are: that there is no educational discontinuity between the secondary schools and the Catholic university, while this discontinuity does exist for the secular-state universities, and that the Church, throughout the whole of its structure, is already equipped for this task of successive elaboration and selection from the grass-roots level. From this standpoint, the Church is a perfectly democratic body (in the paternalistic sense); a peasant's or an artisan's son may in theory become cardinal and pope if he is intelligent and able, and flexible enough to allow himself to be assimilated by the ecclesiastical structure and feel its particular esprit de corps and spirit of conservation, as well as the validity of its present and future interests. If, in the higher reaches of the Church's hierarchy, someone of democratic origin is encountered less frequently than he might be, this happens because of complex reasons, in which the pressure of the great families of the Catholic aristocracy or reasons of state (international) are felt only in part. One very influential reason, however, is that many seminaries are really quite badly equipped and cannot give a full, rounded-off education to an intelligent person from the ranks of the people, while the young aristocrat, without any effort on his part directed towards acquiring it, derives from his family environment a series of aptitudes and qualities of utmost importance for his ecclesiastical career: the tranquil security of his own dignity and authority and the art of dealing with and ruling other people.

One reason for the Church's weakness in the past was that religion offered scarce possibilities for any career outside the ecclesiastical one. The clergy itself had deteriorated qualitatively through `numerically scanty callings' or through response being made only by the intellectually subaltern elements. This crisis was already plain to see before the war and was one aspect of the general crisis of the fixed-income careers with slow turnovers within a large personnel, i. e. it was one aspect of the social unease of the subaltern intellectual stratum (primary and secondary school teachers, priests etc.) which felt the competition from the professions linked to private capitalist organisation in general (e. g. journalism, which absorbs many teachers, and so on). The invasion of the universities or teacher training schools by women and, together with women, priests, had already begun; after the Credaro laws, the Curia could not stop priests obtaining a public diploma allowing them to go in for state jobs, thereby supplementing their individual `finances'. ⁷⁸ As soon as they had obtained the diploma, many of these priests left the Church (because of mobilisation and contact with less suffocating and narrow circles than ecclesiastical ones, this phenomenon assumed a certain importance during the war). Ecclesiastical organisation therefore went through a constitutional crisis which could have been fatal to its power had the state, even without the need for an active struggle, maintained its secular position intact. In the battle among different life-forms, the Church was on the point of dying out automatically due to its own exhaustion. The state came to the Church's rescue. The economic conditions of the clergy were improved on a number of occasions, while the general standard of living, especially among the middle strata (ceti medi), got worse. The improvement was such that `callings' were found to have multiplied in a marvellous fashion, impressing even the Pontiff himself, who explained them exactly on the basis of the new economic situation. There was therefore an enlargement of the base from which those judged suitable for the clergy were chosen, thus allowing greater rigour and increased cultural exigencies.

But if the ecclesiastical career remains the most solid foundation of Vatican power, it does not exhaust the possibilities of this latter. The new school structure allows the introduction of Catholic cells into the leading lay personnel, cells which will get progressively stronger, comprising elements which will owe their position solely to the Church. We must consider that clerical infiltration into the state machinery is about to show a progressive increase, since, in the art of selecting individuals and keeping them permanently bound to itself, the Church is almost unbeatable. By controlling the lycées and the other secondary schools through its own trusted personnel, and by using its characteristic tenacity, the Church will follow the worthiest young people of the poorer classes and help them to carry on their studies in the Catholic universities. Study grants, with the additional subsidy of student hostels, organised with the greatest economy, will be the means of this action. In its present-day phase, the Church, with the impetus that the current Pope is giving to Catholic Action, cannot be content just with turning out priests; it wants to permeate the state (remember the theory of indirect government developed by Bellarmino) and, for that, the laity is necessary, as is a concentration of Catholic culture that the laity represents. There are many people who can become more precious auxiliaries of the Church as university professors and as top managers, etc., than as cardinals or bishops.

Once the base of choice for `callings' has been enlarged, there are great possibilities for extending this type of cultural activity on the part of the laity. The University of the Sacred Heart and the neo-scholastic centre are only the first cells of this work. And in the meantime the 1929 Philosophy Congress was symptomatic: a conflict took place there between actual idealists and neo-scholastics, these latter participants in the Congress going all-out in their quest for victory. After the Concordat the neo-scholastic group wanted in fact to appear combative and sure of itself so as to gain the interest of the young. It has to be borne in mind that one of the strengths of the Catholics consists in the fact that they do not give a fig for the `decisive refutations' of their non-Catholic adversaries; they just take up the refuted thesis again, unperturbed and as if nothing had happened. They either do not understand intellectual `disinterest', scientific truthfulness and honesty, or they understand them as other people's weakness and ingenuousness. They count on the power of their world organisation, which is imposed as if it were a proof of truth, and on the fact that the great majority of the population is not as yet `modern', but still at the Ptolemaic stage as regards its conception of the world and of science.

If the state gives up being an active, a permanently active, centre of its own culture, then to all intents and purposes the Church cannot but triumph. But not only does the state not intervene as an autonomous centre, it destroys any opponent of the Church who is capable of limiting its spiritual dominion over the multitudes.

It can be foreseen that, while the general framework of affairs remains unchanged, the consequences of such a situation in fact may be of the greatest importance. The Church is an even more implacable Shylock than Shakespeare's character: it wants its pound of flesh even at the cost of bleeding its victim dry and, by continually changing its methods, will through its tenacity tend to reach its full programme. As Disraeli remarked, Christians are those more intelligent Jews who have understood what has to be done to conquer the world. The Church cannot be reduced to its `normal' strength by the philosophical refutation of its theoretical postulates and by platonic assertions of the autonomy of the state (unless it is a militant autonomy) but only by means of practical day-to-day activity, by the exaltation of creative human forces throughout the whole area of social life.

One aspect of the question which it is well worth taking into account is that of the financial resources of the Vatican. The ever-developing organisation of Catholicism in the United States offers the possibility of bringing in much more considerable funds, on top of the normal and by now secure income (which as from 1937, however, will decrease by 15 million lire a year due to the reduction in the interest payable on the public debt from 5 per cent to 3.5 per cent) and on top of Peter's pence. Could there arise questions of an international character on the subject of the Church's intervention in the internal affairs of individual countries, with the state permanently subsidising the Church? A charming question, as they say.

The financial question makes the problem of the so-called indissolubility between Treaty and Concordat, proclaimed by the Pope, into a very interesting one. Supposing he finds himself having to have recourse to this political means of exerting pressure on the state, would the problem not immediately be posed of returning the monies already received (which are bound up with the Treaty and not the Concordat)? ⁷⁹ But these sums are so huge, and it is likely that they would, to a great extent, have been spent in the first few years, that their return may be considered, in practice, to be impossible. No state could make such a big loan to the pontiff to help him out of difficulty, much less a private person or a bank. Termination of the Treaty would unleash such a crisis in the practical organisation of the Church that it would, albeit in the long term, find itself insolvent. The financial convention appended to the Treaty must therefore be considered the essential part of the Treaty itself, the guarantee of the near-impossibility of the denunciation of the Treaty, which has been put forward for polemical reasons and to exert political pressure.

Extract from a letter of Leo XIII's to Franz Joseph dated, it seems, June 1892, and quoted on pp.244 et seq. of the book by Francesco Salata, Per la storia diplomatica della Questione Romana [Towards a Diplomatic History of the Roman Question], 1929; `And We shall not remain silent that, in the midst of these hardships, We also lack the means of confronting by Ourself the incessant and manifold material demands inherent in the government of the Church. It is true that succour comes from the spontaneously offered gifts of charity; but to Our distress, there stands always before Us the thought that they finish by being a burden to Our children; and, moreover, one must not harbour notions of the inexhaustibility of public charity.' `By Ourself' means `gathered by taxes' from the citizens of a papal state, for whose sacrifices it appears one does not feel distress; it seems natural for the populations of Italy to pay the expenses of the universal Church.

In the conflict between Bismarck and the Holy See, one can detect the origins of a series of questions that might be raised on account of the fact that the Vatican is situated in Italy and has certain particular relations with the Italian state. Bismarck `had his jurists launch the theory of the responsibility of the Italian state for the political activities of the papacy, whom Italy had established in this condition of invulnerability and lack of legal responsibility as regards the damage inflicted on and offences committed against other States' (Salata, op. cit., p. 271).

Q16§11[ii].

46 State-Church Relations [2]

(Cf. p.15a). ⁸⁰ The Director General of the Fund for Religious Affairs, Raffaele Jacuzio, has published a Commento della nuova legislazione in materia ecclesiastica) [Comment on the New Legislation on Matters Regarding the Church], with an introduction by Alfredo Rocco (Turin 1932) in which all the acts of the Italian state organs, as well as those of the Vatican, for putting the Concordat into effect are collected together and commented on. In relation to the Catholic Action question, Jacuzio writes (p.203): `But since there comes into the concept of politics not only the safeguarding of the juridical order of the state, but also everything pertinent to provisions of a socio-economic order, it is very difficult... to maintain that all political activity is excluded a priori from Catholic Action when... as well as the spiritual education of young people, it also undertakes social and economic activity.'

On the subject of the Concordat, one should also see Vincenzo Morello's book, Il conflitto dopo il Concordato [The Conflict after the Concordat], 1931, and Egilberto Martire's reply, `Reasons for the Conciliation', Rome, Rassegna Romana, 1932. On this Morello-Martire polemic, see the article `A Polemic on the Conciliation' signed `Novus' in the Critica Fascista of 1 February 1933. Morello brings out those points in the Concordat on which the state is by its own standards found wanting and has abdicated its sovereignty; not only that, it appears, but he underlines how on certain points the concessions made to the Church are broader than those made by other signatory countries to concordats. There are four main points of controversy:

1) marriage; by article 43 of the Concordat, marriage is regulated by canon law, which is to say that within the state domain, a law extraneous to the state is applied. By that, on the basis of a law extraneous to the state, Catholics can have their marriage annulled, different from non-Catholics, while `being or not being Catholic should have no importance for civil purposes';

2) by article 5, clause 3, apostate priests or those under censure are banned from certain public offices, i. e. a `sanction' from the Penal Code is applied to people who have not, in the eyes of the state, committed any punishable offence; article 1 of the Code states, on the other hand, that no citizen should be punished except for a deed expressly considered an offence in penal law;

3) Morello cannot see the advantages in the state wiping the slate clean of the laws on subversion, ⁸¹ by recognising the juridical existence of ecclesiastical bodies and religious orders and their faculty for possessing and administering goods of their own;

4) teaching; total and complete exclusion of the state from Church schools, and not at all just those for the technical training of the priesthood (i. e. exclusion of state control over the teaching of theology, etc.) but from those given over to general teaching. Article 39 of the Concordat also refers in fact to the primary and secondary schools held by the clergy in many seminaries, boarding schools and convents, which the clergy make use of to attract boys and youths into the priesthood and into monastic life, but which in themselves are not as yet specialised for this activity. These pupils ought to have the right to state protection.

It seems that in other concordats, account has been taken of certain guarantees vis-à-vis the state, by whose terms not even the clergy may be trained in a way that runs contrary to the laws and legal order of the nation, by the precise requirement that a public diploma or certificate (the one giving access to the Universities) is necessary for many ecclesiastical offices.

47 The State Is the Church

The ministerial circular to which `Ignotus' returns with so much insistence in his booklet Stato fascista, Chiesa e Scuola [Fascist State, Church and the Schools], Rome 1929, commenting that `it is not judged by many to be a monument of political prudence, in that expressions of excessive zeal are used, a zeal which Napoleon (which is to say Talleyrand) shunned absolutely, a zeal which might seem excessive were the document issued by the person of the ecclesiastical administration rather than by a civil Ministry'. The circular was signed by the minister, Belluzzo, and sent to the local Education Offices [Proweditorati] on 28 March 1929 (Circular no. 54, published in the Official Bulletin of the Ministry of National Education on 16 April 1929, and reproduced in its entirety in the Civiltà Cattolica of the subsequent 18 May).

For `Ignotus', this circular provided Catholics with a broad interpretation of article 36 of the Concordat. But after all is said and done, is this true? `Ignotus' writes that, with article 36 of the Concordat, Italy would not recognise but just about (!?) consider `the teaching of Christian Doctrine according to the form received by Catholic tradition as the foundation and crowning-point of public instruction'. But is this restricted and cavilling interpretation of the verb `to consider' on the part of `Ignotus' logical? The question is certainly a serious one and the compilers of the documents probably did not at the time think of the importance of their concessions, hence this abrupt regression. (One can only think that the change in name of the Ministry from `Public Instruction' to `National Education' is bound up with this need for a restrictive interpretation of article 36 of the Concordat, wishing by this to be able to assert that `instruction', the `informative' moment -- still the elementary and preparatory stage -- is one thing, while `education', the `formative' moment, the crowning-point of the educational process, is another, in accordance with Gentile's pedagogy.)

The words `foundation and crowning-point' used in the Concordat repeat the expression employed in the Royal Decree of 1 October 1923, no. 2185, on the Systematisation of the Scholastic Levels and of Educational Curricula in Elementary Instruction: `As the foundation and crowningpoint of elementary instruction at each of its levels there is placed the teaching of Christian doctrine, according to the form received within the Catholic tradition'. In an article, `Religious teaching in the Secondary Schools', published on 21 March 1929 and regarded as unofficial (but authoritative), La Tribuna wrote `The fascist state has directed that the Catholic religion, the intellectual and moral base of our people, be taught not only in the schools attended by our children, but also in those attended by our young people.'

The Catholics, of course, relate all this to the first article of the Statute, which is reconfirmed in the first article of the Treaty with the Holy See, by the interpretation that the state, as such, professes the Catholic religion and not at all just in the sense that the state, in so far as it has need of religious ceremonies in its activity, resolves [variant in the manuscript: establishes] that they must be `Catholic'. On the Catholic stance on public schooling, cf. Fr M. Barbera's article `Religion and Philosophy in the Secondary Schools' in the Civiltà Cattolica of 1 June 1929.

Antonio Gramsci: Past and Present [4] Religion in Schools