Opinions On The Conference:

NEW AND OLD POLITICS OF REPRESSION

Mauro Mellini

ABSTRACT: The conference will create a scandal affirms Mauro Mellini, not so much because it will discuss sex, but because it will bring to light the connections between the control of sexual customs and social organisation, between sexual repression and clerical power. The responsibilities of the lay forces which have always accepted the monopoly of the Catholic Church on sexual and family morals.

(Agenzia Radicale, No. 145, January 1, 1968)

This conference will create a scandal. Not because it will discuss sex. By now even cardinals and Jesuits, superintendents of education and deaconesses speak of sex. The scandal will be about the connections which will emerge from the discussion between the problems of sex and the problems of social organisation, between political reaction and sexual repression. Above all there will be a scandal concerning what is going to be said about the clerical power machine which finds in sexual repression, in preserving, with a little innocuous touching up, inferior sexual customs, one of its most effective tools for pressure and control of the masses which would appear to have valid justification.

Many people believe and cause others to believe or pretend to believe that everything new in the positions of the Catholic Church today indicates progress and emancipation. I believe that just by analysing certain attitudes of the new sexual policies of the church, one can recognise the clerics undoubted capacity for adapting to the new needs for conservation and repression in a society that by now is a consumer society, a society of material well-being, but which logically requires constantly greater conditioning of the choices of the masses.

The monopoly on sexual and family morality has been the principle tool by which the Catholic Church won back temporal power after the "catastrophe" of the Risorgimento. The timidity, the inertia, the lack of a clear vision of the problem on the part of the lay forces has indubitably facilitated that problem for the clerics.

Today, while the church is being obliged to modify deeply its traditional attitude, the lay forces continue in their inertia, limiting themselves to hoping for "openings" by the Catholics without even trying to identify which different and broader objectives are to be hoped for from the certain of the church's new attitudes.

The January 21 conference will be an occasion, which we hope will be followed by many others, for confronting these problems and dissipating many equivocations.

If we know how to keep in mind the central issue of the conference and, while not neglecting the extremely interesting scientific aspects of the question, we become aware that a common action on a level which is not only scientific must necessarily focus on the social and political aspects of the problem, the conference will be a noteworthy contribution to development of a new social and political issue as well as enriching the sphere of freedom and of civil rights.