The ideological antecedents of the lega nord Since the early 1990s, the Lombard League, created and led by Umberto Bossi, has become an essential actor in the Italian political system. This fledgling party, whose earliest organizational roots can be traced to the late 1970s, seems to derive from no previous experience, and to constitute a totally new element in the Italian political universe. It is however possible to iden­tify ideological antecedents of this party in the 1940s and 1950s. They are found either within Christian Democracy, in 1945, or in a relationship of direct electoral competition with it, in 1956-1959. The present ideology of the Lega Nord is in fact an adaptation to the social and political situation of recent years of descriptions and prescriptions already present in the early years of the Italian Republic. It is therefore necessary to reconsider the Lega's present emer­gence in the light of the past failures of the forces to which it owes its heritage.

This article aims to clarify the attitude of the Italian Northern League (Lega Nord) toward the Catholic Church and Catholic faith, since its creation in 1991. The article examines the evolution of the party from the merger of the northern regionalist parties under the leadership of Umberto Bossi (1991–2012) until its current form and its reengineering by its new leader, Matteo Salvini, as a national(ist) League (Lega) aiming to win votes and mandates all over Italy and to become the dominant party of the Italian right. Be it under Bossi or Salvini, the Lega Nord/Lega has always opposed both the humanist teaching of the Catholic Church and mainstream Catholic social organizations, while pretending to defend the “Catholic identity” of the “North,” before turning to the entire country. Under Salvini’s leadership, the Lega joined forces with some rightist Catholic groups prone to complain about Pope Francis’s deemed treason of the Catholic identity, and so reinforced its conservative orientation. As I will show in this article, in the medium term, the enduring success of the Lega Nord/Lega illustrates the decline of mainstream Catholicism in Italy.

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