For a country that contains the seat of Roman Catholicism, Italy is decidedly un-Catholic in its politics. Despite the declaration of abortion as immoral by Pope Paul VI in 1968, abortion has been legal in Italy for 25 years; despite the Church’s 2,000-year-old condemnation of divorce, 12 percent of all marriages in the 98 percent Catholic country end in it; despite the Vatican’s strong denunciation of human cloning, the Italian government has yet to fully ban it. The distance between Rome and the Vatican has continued to widen beyond the width of the Tiber River.

In the past year, Pope John Paul II took a strong position on the war in Iraq, calling it a “defeat for humanity.” Meeting personally with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he won widespread approval throughout Europe for his efforts to bring all parties to the table of peace. However, while the Vatican’s clear stance on the war was popular with the Italian people, it was all but ignored by the Italian government. Going against domestic, international, and religious sentiment, the politicians in Rome were some of the greatest European supporters of US President George Bush. Giving the United States complete access to the state’s military and civilian infrastructure in order to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Italian government made a very risky move in defiance of both popular sentiment and papal authority.

The Vatican and Rome have long had a tumultuous relationship. When Victor Emmanuel I sacked and declared Rome the capital of a unified Italy in 1870, Pope Pius IX shut himself up in the Vatican until his death, declaring himself “prisoner.” Pius IX’s antagonistic policy toward the Italian government banned all Catholics from running in Italian elections and thus maintained itself for over half a century. This antagonism led Italy to oppose the Vatican’s inclusion in international treaties and organizations, including the League of Nations—a precedent preserved to this day (the Holy See is one of the few sovereign states in the world denied a seat in the UN General Assembly). The 1929 Lateran Treaty officially reconciled Italy and the Vatican, but the treaty, coming from the Fascist Benito Mussolini, provided the Vatican with unfavorable terms. Subsequently, popes still felt that they should have a voice in Italian politics given the physical location of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic majority of the population.

It was not until 2002, 132 years after all the papal land, except for the Vatican hill, was taken away, that a pope dared to walk across Rome and enter the Italian Parliament (a former papal court), formally recognizing the sovereignty of the Italian state. Nonetheless, while Pope John Paul II’s actions have helped reconcile the Vatican and the Italian government, the political rift between the two is still apparent. In January 2003, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a series of guidelines for Catholic politicians underscoring their call by God to pass laws for the common good and reaffirming their duty as Catholics to adhere to the Church’s stance on abortion, euthanasia, embryonic research, and other hot-button political topics. One might expect that Italian leaders, serving an overwhelmingly Catholic population, would be some of the few politicians to take such a document to heart.

While it remains unlikely that Italian politicians will admit that the Vatican was right all along, Vatican supporters might come to be seen as scorned prophets. With a dangerous rate of nine births for every 10 deaths, Italy is facing an imminent catastrophe as the workforce ages without fresh blood and, as a result, the economy dwindles. The facts suggest that Italy’s pro-abortion and pro-divorce policies have left the country with fewer children and smaller families over the past 25 years while the Vatican has encouraged large families and condemned both abortion and contraception. All of these Vatican stances are at odds with much of what contemporary Italian and international society believes to be right. When evaluating the impact the Church’s views on these topics has had on Italian politics, the words of Italian parliament member Dario Franceschini speak for themselves: “It’s good advice … but it would be a mistake to look at it as an obligation.”