Senate speaker, bishops urge changes religious freedom law

(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    "Our system is regulated by a law of 1929, drawn up before the Republican era and built on an out-of-date logic of religious tolerance - 'permitted religions' - rather than on that of full religious freedom," Grasso told a conference on religious freedom.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".