Catalogue Number
NMLH.2022.134.21
Object Name
Poster
People
Pietro Nenni
Date
1991
Description
This poster is the 21st in a collection of posters about Pietro Nenni, an Italian socialist politician who was also the national secretary of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and a lifetime Senator since 1970. This poster features photographs of Nenni at a rally with text underneath reading: "The relations of the Party with the Christian Democrats were of collaboration from 1943 to 1947, first in the CLN and then in the Government; they went into crisis in '47; they became of opposition and often bitter struggle from 1948 to 1955. It is one of the central problems of democratic life in a compactly Catholic country like ours, where the mixture of politics and religion, parties and parishes, lay and ecclesiastical hierarchies has always made relations between secularism difficult, and sometimes dramatic. and confessionalism, between state and church. The problem first arose between liberals and Catholics, and was formally resolved in politics, at the beginning of the century, with the compromise between moderates and clericals in the face of socialist danger. It placed itself between the Socialists and the Popular Party in the postwar period, and its failure to resolve it was one of the causes of the collapse of the liberal and constitutional state. Fascism boasted of having resolved it with the Conciliation, which however concerned the State and the Church as such, not the living matter of the political and social action of Catholics in society and in the State. It reappeared after the Liberation, all the more acutely as for the first time the party of Catholics - the Christian Democrats - established itself as a - relative majority in the elections of '46 and '53 and as an absolute majority in those of '48 . From this brief historical analysis by Nenni on relations between Catholics and the State, dialogue with the Christian Democratic Party began." and the image caption reads: "Above Pietro Nenni, at a rally for the tenth anniversary of the liberation in 1955. Below with Raniero Panzieri in Moscow in 1955" (all text translated from Italian)
