ABSTRACT
A further experience of ‘modernisation’ came with the advent of industrialisation, la prima industrializzazione, in Italy from the 1880s until just before the outbreak of the First World War. The economic and social changes – migration and the creation of industrial towns and cities-which that process generated, and their political consequence, the emergence of a revolutionary Socialist working class movement with a materialistic and atheistic ideological base, were to present a major challenge to Italian Catholicism over the next century and, in the short term, to bring a new, though limited, form of secularisation in their wake. By ‘secularisation’ I mean ‘the historical process whereby society and culture is liberated from the control of religion.’1 The depth and breadth of that process would vary throughout the period with which we are dealing. In this context, the word ‘lay’ is used here in relation to those members of the Church not belonging to the clergy. It is also used in relation to those individuals, groups or political parties that opposed Church influence on Italian society and the institutional state: the words ‘laic’ and ‘secularist’ are used in the same sense.
