Italy passes law allowing divorce in 6 months
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Italy has slashed the time it takes to get a divorce to six months from three years in the latest sign of the Catholic Church’s waning influence over life and politics in the country.
The change is part of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s efforts to tame the country’s much-hated bureaucracy.
“Another promise kept. Let’s move forward,” he tweeted after the law passed in parliament late on Wednesday.
The quick passage of the law underscored how the Catholic Church is gradually loosening its grip over Italian morals and politicians. A growing number of young Catholics are living together and having babies outside marriage, while several Italian mayors have registered gay marriages celebrated outside Italy.
Virtually the only dissent over the divorce law came from the Catholic newspaper Avvenire, which called it “a devastating anti-family downward slide.”
The “fast divorce law,” which the lower house approved with a vote of 398 for and 28 against, cuts the time Italians have to wait for a divorce to six months in uncontested cases and a year in contested ones.
“The Church really didn’t even put up a fight ... because they realized that it was a lost cause and did not want to fall flat on its face with a useless act of heroism,” said Alberto Melloni, a leading Church historian.
Italy has come a long way since the classic 1961 comedy “Divorce Italian Style” in which a man played by Marcello Mastroianni seeks a lover for his wife so he can catch them in the act, kill both in an “honor crime,” get a light prison sentence, and marry his cousin.
Divorce in Italy did not become legal in Italy until 1970.
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