(ANSA) Rome, February 17 - Senate speaker Pietro Grasso
Tuesday and the secretary general of the Italian bishops'
conference (CEI) called for a new Italian law on religious
freedom to update the legacy of the 1929 concordat agreement
between Italy and the Vatican.
"Our system is regulated by a law of 1929, drawn up
before the Republican era and built on an out-of-date logic of
religious tolerance - 'permitted religions' - rather than on
that of full religious freedom," Grasso told a conference on
religious freedom.
"The Constitution already has made that law obsolete.
"Hence the urgency for it to be replaced with a new
organic law on religious freedom is evident".
The CEI secretary general, Mons. Nunzio Galantino, for
his part told a conference on "religions admitted to religious
freedom" that "what appears necessary is to deepen together the
objective of an eventual legislative intervention, which is to
be wished for if carefully circumscribed (for instance regarding
religious buildings ... ).
The monsignor also warned against the "risk of a kind of
amnesia" that pays lip service to the fundamental values
governing relations between state and religious confessions but
"in reality aims to overtake it or surreptitiously overturn it".
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