New Italian president supports “religious freedom for all”

First working weeks at the Quirinale palace for the new President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, after the oath-taking ceremony and official investiture by Piero Grasso, President of the Senate.

Although it has been said that Mattarella wants to play a ‘referee’ role as the new head of state, expectations are high and comments emerging from people he has known, have given a better understanding of his spiritual and ethical convictions.

“Spiritually speaking the new President is a man of few words who knows how to listen and engage” writes Andrea Ricciardi in the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Ricciardi portrays Sergio Mattarella as a believer who is both ‘mature’ and ‘brave’ but who also has a great sense of secularization and resistance to a Church State, basically, a Catholic unhappy with the secular-Catholic clash.

As a deep-thinking, yet modest Catholic –Ricciardi continues– Mattarella’s faith will move him to unify and represent the national identity and interests. Taking this line means he will be an ‘institutional guarantor,’ not a leading man, but someone with firm convictions and wisdom who can be an anchor in times of transition.

A FAITH PERSON “WHO LIVES IN THE PRESENT”

What Ricciardi says is echoed by Antonio Spadaro, the editor of Civiltà Cattolica who, in an interview, described Mattarella as “having a big personality, a legal expert  and politician of high-standing whose Catholic upbringing has been fruitful.

He is not an ideological Catholic flexing his muscles. He grew up at a complex time and his faith is like an enzyme,” Spadaro continues, “Faith for him is like yeast mixed into history, it’s not some abstract ideology that imposes itself on reality, it’s from a Christian who ‘lives in the present’.”

Domenico Maselli, former member of the Parliament, also has a positive impression of Mattarella. Writing in the paper ‘Riforma’ he remembers when, in 1995, after an intervention in Parliament by Maselli, there then followed a discussion over the agreement between State and the Lutheran church and Mattarella ‘expressed his full agreement with my speech and underlined the importance of religious freedom for all and the separation of State and Churches’. 

Maselli concludes: “I am glad that he has been elected President of the Republic.”