Un dibattito politico su religione e socialismo (1908-1910)

The key objective of this critical edition is to collect the numerous texts, that have been produced by a debate concerning the connection between religion and socialism from 1908 to 1910 in Italy, and to present them in a new version forwarded by an historical introduction able to show how this issue was considered politically relevant already at the dawn of the twentieth century. The debate was triggered by a letter published on the front page of the socialist newspaper “Avanti!” in July 1908. This letter has been written by two young Catholic people, destined to remain almost unknown, Felice Perroni and Guglielmo Quadrotta. Notwithstanding, they were able to give place to an argument which involved some of the most prominent political and cultural figures of the period: amongst them the leading socialist party members Filippo Turati, Ivanoe Bonomi, Anna Kuliscioff, the novelist Antonio Fogazzaro, the polemist Giuseppe Prezzolini, the philosopher Giuseppe Rensi and, though not directly, Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce. Regarding the relationship between religion and socialism, this argument has to be situated within the context of that movement, the so-called “modernism”, which aimed to challenge both the primacy of the ecclesiastical hierarchies in the Catholic Church and the way they convey a creed that seems to be conceived with a view to maintaining unchanged the social and economic structures of society. This critical edition wants to illustrate how Perroni and Quadrotta were influenced by Ernesto Buonaiuti, who played a crucial role in the “modernist” movement and how their request to become member of the socialist party, on the bases of their Christian and Catholic background, implied a relationship between religion and political parties, which results to be deeply different from that destined to affirm in the following years in Italy. For Buonaiuti, there was no need for Catholics to identify themselves in a Catholic political party.