Il confronto tra cristianesimo e comunismo nella secolarizzazione del XX secolo L’originale percorso di Mario Gozzini

In the backdrop of the confrontation between faith and politics, in particular the relationship of dialogue between Communism and Christianity in Italy during the secularization process of the 20th century, the essay aims to retrace the long biographical story of the Catholic intellectual (later elected as an independent senator in the lists of the Italian Communist Party) Mario Gozzini, with a special focus on the elements of continuity and discontinuity between modernism, the Second Vatican Council and religious dissent. By making nonconformist choices of freedom of conscience, expressing positions of dissent from the prevailing orientations in Catholicism, and paying for them personally with isolation and the risk of excommunication by the ecclesiastical side, Gozzini had the great ability to affect, outside of integralisms, on a double institutional front: 1) in church circles, he contributed to the gradual shift from a position of intransigent repulsion toward aspects of modernity and communism to an acceptance of certain changes in social customs, and an acceptance of believers' autonomy of political and social choice; 2) on the side of the state and political parties, he contributed to greater pluralism and a shift away from the PCI's atheistic positions on religion, evident in the ideological revision of Eurocommunism.