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Scandal in Rome has buffeted the church - Italian political corruption purges
National Catholic Reporter, March 26, 1993 by Peter Hebblethwaite
But undoubtedly the main blows of "Operation Clean Hands" have fallen on Communion and Liberation.
Always critical of Italian Catholic Action, which had made "the religious option" and tried to distance itself from party politics, CL was riding high in the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.
Indeed, at the 1987 synod on the laity, CL not only claimed to run the show but was proposed by John Paul as the very model of the "new movements," which expressed the charismatic nature of the church better than the old religious orders.
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Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, archbishop of Milan, pointed out how dangerous and divisive they were. Martini is one of the few public figures acknowledged to have "clean hands." From 1984 he has been speaking of one of the "three plagues" of Milan as "political and administrative corruption."
Martini's hostility to CL was often attributed to Jesuit "jealousy" of the new movement. It now appears to be more solidly grounded than that. Three years ago, CL began to move closer to the Socialist Party of Bettino Craxi, now resigned and under investigation.
Though sometimes presented as an audacious "opening to the left," it was nothing of the kind, since Craxi's party was socialist in name only. The alliance may have had more sinister implications.
As prime minister, Craxi signed the revised concordat with the Holy See in 1984. One interpretation now is that it marked a veil drawn over mysterious events such as the death of Roberto Calvi in 1982, the abandoned investigation of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank's alleged involvement in the crash of the Banco Ambrosiano.
On the more political level what has been revealed in Milan is that the kick-backs were not just the result of greedy individuals on the take. Cash regularly went into the party coffers as a way of purchasing political influence. Placemen in state companies allotted contracts on the basis of rigged tenders. The "commission" they expected was usually 5 percent, but it varied from town to town.
At first it was every party for itself. But after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, they began to collude. In Milan, for example, 50 percent of any bribe went to the Christian Democrats, and 25 percent each to the socialists and the communists (now rebaptized as the Democratic Party of the Left).
The Italian political system has been called "partyocracy" rather than democracy. Far from being loose coalitions brought together to fight elections, Italian parties are huge organizations with great powers of patronage. They needed large injections of cash to pay their many full-time employees. A referendum on the funding of political parties is scheduled for April.
For decades since the war the Christian Democrats and their coalition allies were kept in power by the fear of communism: Elections were portrayed as a battle between home rule and Moscow rule. Few questions were asked.
But now that constraint has been removed, Italians have a real electoral choice and the establishment parties all have suffered grievously. They have lost out to the Lombardy League in the north and to a reformist Christian democratic group called the Rete (Network). The coming man is Leoluca Orlando, former mayor of Palermo, Sicily, who has tried to clean up the party and rid it of Mafia pressures.
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