Roman Catholic Church ambiguous as Italian elections loom

Rome: As Italy approaches national elections next month, battle lines between the two main blocs are clearly drawn but voters asking which side the powerful Roman Catholic Church supports are getting confusing signals.

On the one side Romano Prodi, the centre-left leader whose coalition includes hard-core, anti-clerical communists, is a devout Catholic who goes to Mass every Sunday and is often depicted by editorial cartoonists wearing a priest's cassock.

On the other side Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is divorced and re-married, says it is his centre-right coalition, which includes former Christian Democrats and former Fascists, that is the real political standard bearer of Catholic values.

Officially, Italy's Catholic church has said it will not tell Catholics to vote for one side or the other, but to keep fundamental principles in mind when choosing candidates.

The presence of Vatican City, the seat of the papacy, in the heart of the Italian capital meant that in the past, devout Italians looked to the Church for guidance at election time.

For more than three decades in the post-war period, the Catholic Church had no doubt about who practising Catholics should vote for, the Christian Democrats.

But the monolithic "Catholic vote" began disintegrating in the 1970s and has not existed since the early 1990s, when the Christian Democrats disappeared under the weight of corruption scandals. The Catholic political diaspora began.

"A very interesting aspect of the Catholic vote is that Catholics are present on both sides of the spectrum," said Professor Franco Pavoncello, acting president of John Cabot University in Rome and professor of political science.

"That serves the Church well because they can have an influence no matter who wins," he said.

Cardinal Camillo Ruini, head of Italy's bishops' conference, said in a recent speech he was worried that a handful of regional administrations were considering norms that put de facto couples on the same level as married couples.

Some centre-right leaders saw this as a clear blessing for their side since the centre-left has pledged a type of legal protection for both gay and unmarried heterosexual couples.

But the relationship between politics and religion in Italy is not just black and white these days.

Indeed, examples of fishing for votes on both sides of the pond ahead of the April 9-10 election abound.