ABSTRACT
The year 1978 makes more sense because it also marked other important watersheds in the history of both the Church and the Italian State. Italian democracy survived the Red Brigades’ ‘blow at the heart of the state’. Despite widespread fears that Moro’s murder marked the triumph of Red Brigades terrorism, and consequently the end of the ‘first (Italian) republic’, the efforts of the terrorists ultimately failed; the ‘historic compromise’ enacted in the form of Communist parliamentary abstention from voting against the new government’s reform programme (‘no no-confidence’) ensured that the Communists, and the trade union movement that it controlled, the CGIL, closed ranks with the Christian Democrats and other democratic forces in defence of the republic, supporting legislative and other measures that would eventually defeat terrorism from all sides.1
