Cattolicesimo e politica. Dalla «civiltà secolare cristiana» al saeculum

The paper presents two recent books concerning the problem of civil order and the role of Christians – above all of Catholics and Catholic Church – in modern societies. The sociologist Luca Diotallevi declines the fundamental notion of civil order in relation with two different and opposite paradigms, both modern: the “French” paradigm of laïcité and the “American” paradigm of Religious freedom. Only the second permits a comprehension of Catholicism as a social factor capable to avoid the absolute legitimateness of an unique temporal power and thus to safeguard the liberal democratic societies against a possible totalitarian deviation. In his lecture pronounced in 1962, the (former politician) Catholic priest and theologian Giusseppe Dossetti, considers the presence of an eminently Catholic government as the most dangerous form of antireligious laicism and the principal risk for the future of the Catholic church in the Italian modern society. Both the books locate the clericalism as, paradoxically, the principal accomplice of antichristian laicism.