ITALY
Telegraph (UK)
Andrea Vogt 24 May 2015
Ireland’s historic vote in favour of same sex marriage reverberated across Italy on Sunday, as Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s lieutenants came out in force to call for fast-track passage of a stymied civil partnership law.
Socially conservative Italy now is the only Western European country that does not recognize either same sex marriage or civil unions. But that the Irish referendum garnered an unexpectedly strong 62 per cent “Yes” vote in such a deeply Catholic country rallied backers of the Italian law, which has been languishing in parliament for months.
Several editorials on Sunday suggested that such a referendum in Italy would have a similar outcome, recalling the divorce referendum in 1974, when 60 percent of Italian voters went against the wishes of the Catholic church on a major social issue. …
The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, described the vote against church teaching on gay marriage as “overwhelming” and said Catholic leaders needed “urgently” to find a new way to speak to the country’s young.
“It’s a social revolution,” he said. “The church needs to do a reality check right across the board.”
He said that some church figures who argued in the “No” camp came across as “harsh, damning and unloving, the opposite of their intention”.
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