ABSTRACT
The church-state relationship has been a central theme of Italian historiography. Two themes in particular can be highlighted: the role played by the Catholic Church in the failure of successive political regimes to consolidate themselves, and the relationship between the church, the state and political parties. Thus, a prominent interpretation of the political crisis of the 1990s sees it as a third case of state failure, following those of liberalism, which collapsed in the early 1920s, and of Fascism, which disintegrated in 1942/43.1 Second, the most significant aspect of the 1990s crisis was probably the collapse of the Christian Democratic Party (DC) which dominated Italian governments from 1947 to 1994. This collapse was accompanied by a major shift in church-party relations and confirmed a shift already taking place in church-state relations.
