Lega Nord: between mistrust of the Church, traditionalist sympathies and neo-pagan alternatives (beginnings)

ABSTRACT The focus of this article is the Lega party and the religious question from the early 1990s to its definitive collocation on the centre-right in 2001, highlighting the various facets of the movement. One faction grounded in intransigent culture, suspicious of modernity and with evident links to Fraternità Sacerdotale di San Pio X was juxtaposed by another faction espoused, in particular, by Gilberto Oneto which called for a new political religion inspired by pre-Christian Celtic traditions based on ‘small homelands’ whose raison d’être was an assumed Padanian identity juxtaposed to Christian standardization. In the new millennium these anti-Christian stances were cast aside, for the most part, and Lega Catholicism took on a non-universal doctrinal character made up of local, identity-based and racist ideologies. The relationship between the Lega and the radical right milieu is evident, as is its opposition to Vatican II on the grounds of the latter’s vocation for dialogue with other religions and denominations and its solidarity with the poor and marginalized.