Once again, an evangelical organisation in Italy has raised its voice to demand equal treatment from the state. In this case, a letter has been sent to the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella.

It was written by the Italian Evangelical Alliance (AEI) in protest against a circular from the Italian government's Ministry of Education (led by Giorgia Meloni), encouraging public schools across the country to actively participate in a ‘Jubilee of the Educational World’ promoted by the Vatican.

Catholicism will celebrate it in late October and early November. It will include a massive Eucharist in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican and seeks to ‘launch a powerful appeal for education to be a creator of fraternity, peace and justice,’ as described on the Jubilee website.

Launched by the late Pope Francis, it will include projects in “Catholic and non-Catholic” schools and universities. Highlights of the week will be “crossing the Holy Door” and promoting “dialogue with the Church’s doctrine on education”.

Evangelicals: Promoting Catholic rituals creates “hierarchy between different faiths”

The country’s evangelicals believe that the government should not have given instructions to educational institutions. The circular from the Ministry of Education in mid-September “is not merely informative”, says the Italian Evangelical Alliance: public education authorities are taking “a proactive role” in co-organising with the Holy See.

“The ministerial act seriously exceeds institutional neutrality when it actively promotes the participation of students in specific religious practices”, says the national evangelical body in its letter to President Mattarella. “The possibility of ‘passing through the Holy Door’ and ‘reserving specific places to attend the closing Holy Mass’ are not neutral cultural elements, but rituals specific to the Catholic faith”.

In practice, the government's instructions are a “violation of individual freedom of conscience” that places “non-Catholic students or those without a religious orientation before the alternative of either socially induced adherence to a foreign spiritual experience or blatant self-exclusion”.

In other words, recommending that educational institutions join a Roman Catholic Jubilee is “undermining the function of the school as a place of inclusion and establishing a de facto hierarchy between different faiths”.

Use of public education resources and risk of “indoctrination”

The evangelical organisation’s letter also criticises the fact that very expensive public resources, paid for with everyone’s taxes, such as teachers’ hours and educational facilities, are being put at the service of a specific religion.

A final observation that the AEI makes to the country's president in its letter is the “risk of religious indoctrination” due to the “announced distribution of ‘special teaching materials’ to prepare students for the event”. There is “a real risk that, under the guise of educational activities, confessional content will be conveyed, presenting as universal values and perspectives that belong to a single religious tradition. This would constitute a clear violation of educational pluralism and the freedom of conscience of pupils, whose critical thinking would be guided rather than stimulated”.

For all these reasons, the Italian Evangelical Alliance calls on the President of Italy to safeguard the fundamental rights of children and young people in public school classrooms.

It is the duty of the President of the Republic, they say, to preserve “the supreme principle of the secular nature of the State, repeatedly affirmed by the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, according to which the impartiality and equidistance of the State towards all confessions are a guarantee of pluralism and religious freedom”.