The Constitutional court 40 years after the 1984 turning point. A constitutional perspective

The Italian Constitutional court contributed to paving the way for the Concordat stipulated in 1984 between Italy and the Holy See. In the following 40 years the Court delivered important judgments regarding both the guarantee that all religious beliefs are equally free before the law, as well as the meaning of the principle of secularism (laicità). The article explains, on one side, that the social, cultural and political context may have had an influence on the constitutional case-law. On the other side, it exposes the legislator’s inertia: in more than 70 years of republican regime the latter has not been able to enact any legislation on freedom of religion. The second part of the article focuses on the so-called method of secularism (laicità), which has been used to take correct public choices (such as the legislation on bioethical issues). The method implies that there are no absolute truths, but only partial ones, and that the political choices have to be based on the refusal of fundamentalisms and on the search of a coexistence between conflicting values. It proposes to consider the balancing method conducted by the Court as a virtuous example of the method of secularism (laicità).