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IAS Fellows’ Public Lecture by Dr Jorge Dagnino (University of San Sebastian, Chile)

Abstract

There has been a growing revival of interest in the subject of political religion in recent years. However, despite this tendency, the perspective of contemporary Italian Catholics on the subject has hardly been touched upon, except by Emilio Gentile and Renato Moro. This lecture addresses this gap, analysing the response to the phenomenon of political religions during the 1930s by the two intellectual branches of Italian Catholic Action, namely, the FUCI and the Movimento laureati. Indeed, it was during the 1930s that these intellectuals became most aware of the novelty and danger posed by the emergence of the political religions. This lecture by Dr Dagnino follows the analyses provided by the FUCI and the Movimento laureati on Bolshevism, National Socialism and Italian Fascism. During the 1930s new concepts such as ‘political religions’, ‘religion of the blood’, ‘totalitarian religion’ and ‘new idols’, all expressed the effort of these Catholic intellectuals to come to terms with the new reality of the sacralisation of politics being carried out by the totalitarian experiments.