Getting Ahead in Italy

The Pope was not invited to the ecumenical council being held in Rome last week. At the Eliseo Theater, H miles from St. Peter's, delegates from eight tiny but prosperous Italian Protestant denominations met for their first congress since 1920. Theme of the meeting: how Italian Protestants can match the aggiornamento of the Vatican Council.

With only 200,000 members in a traditional stronghold of Roman Catholicism, Italy's Protestants have had a long and painful struggle to gain the right to worship freely. Until 1848, the 35,000 Waldensians--descendants of a breakaway Catholic sect that was excommunicated in 1184, and turned Protestant in the 16th century--were forbidden to attend universities, practice law or medicine, or open new churches. The unification of Italy brought an invasion of Methodist and Baptist missionaries from Britain and the U.S., but Mussolini's 1929 agreement with the Vatican made Catholicism the state church, and Fascist laws strictly curtailed Protestants.

Italy's postwar constitution declared that "all religious confessions are equally free under the law"--a freedom often curtailed in practice by the unre-pealed Fascist laws. In the late '40s and early '50s, Protestant missionaries took into their churches many Catholics excommunicated by Pope Pius XII for voting Communist. But the bigger come-on was free medicine and food, leading Catholics to sneer at the Protestants as "Rice Krispies Christians."

The decisive legal change came in 1958, when Italy's Constitutional Court overruled the arrest of a Pentecostal minister who had turned his apartment into a chapel. Nowadays, Protestants face nothing worse than occasional bureaucratic delays in getting permission to build churches, and the expectable problems of being a minority. A Baptist missionary tells of converting an entire family of Catholics except for one daughter, who feared that nobody in the village would marry her if she left the Catholic Church.

Since the papacy of John XXIII, hostility on both sides is giving way--slowly --to dialogue and cooperation. Catholic priests often attend lectures at the Waldensian seminary in Rome, and one Italian Protestant attended the Vatican Council sessions as an official observer. Today, Italian Protestants are cautiously hopeful about the Vatican's new interest in friendship with other churches. "We welcome any step toward Christian unity based on the word of God," says the Rev. Ermanno Rostan, moderator of the Waldensian Church. But, he adds, "we are also vigilant."

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