Lateran Treaty

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The Lateran Treaty was one of the Lateran Pacts of 1929 or Lateran Accords, agreements made in 1929 between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See, signed on February 11, 1929, and ratified by the Italian parliament on June 7, 1929, settling the "Roman Question". Italy was then under a Fascist government; the succeeding democratic governments have all upheld the treaty. In 1947, the Lateran Pacts were incorporated into the democratic Constitution of Italy.

Content

The pacts consisted of two documents, with four annexes:

• A political treaty recognising the full sovereignty of the Holy See in the State of Vatican City, which was thereby established, a document accompanied by the annexes:
  • A plan of the territory of the Vatican City State
  • A list and plans of the buildings with extraterritorial privilege and exemption from expropriation and taxes
  • A list and plans of the buildings with exemption from expropriation and taxes
  • A financial convention agreed on as a definitive settlement of the claims of the Holy See following the loss of its territories and property

• A concordat regulating relations between the Catholic Church and the Italian state

History

Territory of Vatican City State, established by the Lateran Accords

During the unification of Italy in the mid-19th Century, the Papal States resisted incorporation into the new nation, even as all the other Italian countries joined it; Camillo Cavour's dream of proclaiming the Kingdom of Italy from the steps of St. Peter's Basilica did not come to pass. The nascent Kingdom of Italy invaded and occupied Romagna (the eastern portion of the Papal States) in 1860, leaving only Latium in the Pope's domains. Latium, including Rome itself, was occupied and annexed in 1870. For the following sixty years, relations between the Papacy and the Italian government were hostile, and the status of the Pope became known as the "Roman Question". Negotiations for the settlement of the Roman Question began in 1926 between the government of Italy and the Holy See, and culminated in the agreements of the Lateran Pacts, signed—the Treaty says—for King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy by Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister and Head of Government, and for Pope Pius XI by Pietro Gasparri, Cardinal Secretary of State, on February 11, 1929. The agreements were signed in the Lateran Palace, hence the name by which they are known.

The agreements included a political treaty which created the state of the Vatican City and guaranteed full and independent sovereignty to the Holy See. The Pope was pledged to perpetual neutrality in international relations and to abstention from mediation in a controversy unless specifically requested by all parties. In the first article of the treaty, Italy reaffirmed the principle established in the 4 March 1848 Statute of the Kingdom of Italy, that "the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Religion is the only religion of the State". The attached financial agreement was accepted as settlement of all the claims of the Holy See against Italy arising from the loss of temporal power in 1870.

Francesco Pacelli was the right-hand man for Pietro Gasparri during the Lateran Treaty negotiations

The sum thereby given to the Holy See was actually less than Italy declared it would pay under the terms of the Law of Guarantees of 1871, by which the Italian government guaranteed to Pope Pius IX and his successors the use of, but not sovereignty over, the Vatican and Lateran Palaces and a yearly income of 3,250,000 lire as indemnity for the loss of sovereignty and territory. The Holy See, on the grounds of the need for clearly manifested independence from any political power in its exercise of spiritual jurisdiction, had refused to accept the settlement offered in 1871, and the Popes thereafter until the signing of the Lateran Treaty considered themselves prisoners in the Vatican, a small, limited area inside Rome.

To commemorate the successful conclusion of the negotiations, Mussolini commissioned the Via della Conciliazione (Road of the Conciliation), which would symbolically link the Vatican City to the heart of Rome.

The Constitution of the Italian Republic, adopted in 1947, states that relations between the State and the Catholic Church "are regulated by the Lateran Treaties".

In 1984, an agreement was signed, revising the concordat. Among other things, both sides declared: "The principle of the Catholic religion as the sole religion of the Italian State, originally referred to by the Lateran Pacts, shall be considered to be no longer in force". The Church's position as the sole state-supported religion of Italy was also ended, replacing the state financing with a personal income tax called the otto per mille, to which another ten religious groups, Christian and non-Christian, also have access. The revised concordat regulated the conditions under which civil effects are accorded to church marriages and to ecclesiastical declarations of nullity of marriages. Abolished articles included those concerning state recognition of knighthoods and titles of nobility conferred by the Holy See, the undertaking by the Holy See to confer ecclesiastical honours on those authorized to perform religious functions at the request of the State or the Royal Household, and the obligation of the Holy See to enable the Italian government to present political objections to the proposed appointment of diocesan bishops.

In 2008, it was announced that the Vatican would no longer immediately adopt all Italian laws, citing conflict over right-to-life issues following the trial and ruling of the Eluana Englaro case.

Violations

Italy's anti-Jewish laws of 1938 prohibited marriages between Jews and non-Jews, including Catholics. The Vatican viewed this as a violation of the Concordat, which gave the church the sole right to regulate marriages involving Catholics. Article 34 of the Concordat also had specified that marriages performed by the Catholic Church would always be considered valid by civil authorities. The Vatican understood this to include marriages between non-Aryan Catholics or between one Aryan and a non-Aryan.

See also

• Properties of the Holy See
• Reichskonkordat, treaty between the Holy See and Nazi Germany

References

Bibliography

• Latourette, Kenneth Scott. Christianity In a Revolutionary Age A History of Christianity in the 19th and 20th Century: Vol 4 The 20th Century In Europe (1961) pp 32–35, 153, 156, 371
• Riccards, Michael (1998). Vicars of Christ: Popes, Power, and Politics in the Modern World. New York: Crossroad. ISBN 0-8245-1694-X.
• Zuccotti, Susan (2002). Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09310-1.

External links

• Text of the Lateran Treaty and other laws and decrees related to Vatican City State
• Text in the original language of the Lateran Pacts, including the financial convention and the concordat