When you come back to live in Italy for a while, as I have, you tune in again to the sound of the human voice in the open air, of the hum of bargain and chat in the market and groups of teenagers leaning over parked scooters. Italians talk, and in the night, when there is no one about, they write what they want to say on walls. Graffiti is everywhere. On the morning of 26th May this year, people woke up to a new message. "Grazie Liverpool," it said, for beating AC Milan, and, more to the point, Milan's hated owner, Silvio Berlusconi. Near where I live in Florence, the crumbling Palazzo Scala della Gherardesca and its formal garden are being restored. On the wall beneath the sign that announces the project, someone has written: La storia non si cancella. Ora e sempre resistenza (history can't just be wiped out. Resistance now and forever) and signed off with that almost quaintly anachronistic mark, the hammer and sickle. Look up and you see why. The 15th-century palace is to become a five-star Four Seasons hotel. Four Seasons may be a Canadian multinational, but its acquisition of the palace, and especially its famous garden, spells America and capitalism.
One polemicist in my neighbourhood is taking this street politics to a new level, sticking his carefully typed messages on to every lamppost. Lampposts here give space as much as light. They are plastered with pieces of paper with waving octopus legs of telephone numbers, asking for rooms or jobs. This correspondent, though, is posting up a story. It is the life of the new Pope, Benedict XVI. Each month a new message appears, a sentence long. November's reads: 1943-45. Ratzinger è stato pilota volontario dell'aviazione di Hitler. This Pope, this German Pope, the accusation runs, was no mere conscript into the Nazi war effort, but an active volunteer. The Catholic church, he is hinting, has an inglorious past and allied itself to fascism before, during and after the second world war.
There is a reason why this local scribe is so agitated now. Italy's Christian Democratic party, which had represented the Catholic interest, imploded in the political chaos of the early 1990s. But the Catholic vote is still large—25 per cent of Italians attend mass—and no party can neglect it. At the same time, the hierarchy in Rome, led by the suave Cardinal Ruini, is flexing its muscles. Buoyed by the celebrity death of John Paul II, it is courting the young with an anti-globalisation message, and the old by maintaining the last Pope's hard moral line.
Despite two long-standing concordati, the first in 1929 and the second in 1984, which were supposed to settle the relationship between church and state, almost every day is bringing new political interventions by the Vatican. A general election in the spring will decide the tone of Italian society for years; the era of Berlusconi is probably coming to an end and political parties of all persuasions are pouring into the vacuum. In this febrile atmosphere the boundaries between church and state become blurred. The last three months have seen heated debates about rights for cohabiting couples—which would eventually include gays—about euthanasia, and about the introduction of the Ru486 an abortion pill available in France since 1988 and Britain since 1991.
Confident though the Catholic hierarchy is, a robust tradition of anti-clericalism means it never goes unanswered. Books, websites and demonstrations all spring up as soon as a new political front is opened. Doctors and lawyers justify their actions in public using the language of human rights. My angry neighbour is not alone. How different this is to the situation in Britain, especially England, where we cling to the idea of the velvet benevolence of the Anglican church and comfort ourselves with its invisibility. The Protestant church necessarily sided with the great Whig families and parliament in ousting the Catholic Stuarts in 1688. That meant that British 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, perhaps uniquely in Europe, had no need to be stridently anti-clerical. The church seemed to side with parliament and progress, and vicars seemed to be lazy and ineffectual. Atheists like David Hume were more or less left alone, and they returned the compliment of polite avoidance. In the evangelical revivals of the next century and the emancipation of Catholics, the church played a hand deft enough to ensure that, unlike the French or Italian Catholic churches, it remained an arm of the state. Now its schools operate with government funds, its bishops sit in the Lords, and its senior archbishop crowns the head of state.
But this reputation for tolerance is now misleading. In forcing the retraction of the appointment of a gay man as bishop of Reading, Rowan Williams lost the opportunity to make it plain that for Anglicans everyone is equal in the sight of God. But much more urgent is the Anglican church's quiet social engineering in its schools. It is no good the church authorities saying that in many areas, especially inner cities, they do not enforce rules about religious persuasion. If these schools are not Anglican schools, the church need have no say in running them. But these schools give the church much of its authority. Without them where would church attendance be? It is too late for Britain to develop an anticlerical habit. But it is not too late to open our eyes to the fact that a formal separation between church and state is at least a century overdue.
