The difficulties at the local level for the “new religious minorities”, notably Muslims, to achieve full effectiveness of the right to the house of worship mark a new stage with Executive Order No. 03/EP dated 15/11/2023 of the Municipality of Monfalcone: through this measure the Municipality want to stop the worship activities that are carried out in a room available to the Islamic Center Darus Salaam, on the grounds that, in so doing, it would have changed the intended use of the property, which is not consistent with the general urban plan.

The ordinance seeks to compel the restoration of the intended use of the property included in the office category and not collective services and facilities. It would therefore be possible to to carry out cultural activities there by members of the association but it could not be turned into a house of worship.

On a factual ground, the ordinance is based on numerous checks by the local police that would have verified how the property in question was used by a number of very high number of people that would change the urban load of the area and consequently would be the telltale change of use that would result in the violation. In the face of a maximum capacity, also because of security needs, of a hundred people, the hall would turn out on certain occasions concerning special occasions to be used by many hundreds of people, with need of occupying public land because it is not capacious enough.

Thus, a change of use would have been permanently determined with consequent change in the urban load, determining a construction abuse, in respect of which which the Municipality of Monfalcone orders the immediate restoration of the destination of use legitimately authorized with a ban on the use of the property as a place of worship.

The issue is, as is well known, obviously very delicate from the point of view of political management and very complicated from a legal point of view: urban planning needs do not make it easy to find solutions in politically fluid and accommodating situations, all the more so when the local local politics is marked explicitly in terms of hostility to a particular religion, as in the case at hand.

It is possible to infer from press reports that the ordinance will be appealed before the administrative judge and thus in the coming months we may have an answer regarding its legitimacy in relation to the concrete situation and also in relation to the right to the house of worship.

Some general reflection is already possible, however, since this measure simply is a moment of venting a conflict concerning a problem that at the local level is present now throughout the country and which will continue to recur unless we take structural measures capable of preventing it: namely, the problem of allowing all those who want to exercise their religious freedom to be able to have a house of worship, a right enshrined over and over again very clearly in constitutional jurisprudence and in particular thematized with some binding force for the public administration in Judgment No. 254 of 2019 (on which see in this Review M. Croce, Observations at first reading on the judgment No. 254/2019 of the Constitutional Court, No. 2/2019).

Clearly, in the absence of the correct building title, the consequence can only be a building abuse in the form of a change of use, but one must begin to wonder: what is this situation determined by? Was that religious community given the opportunity to obtain another property in an area where by zoning plan it is allowed to have buildings for worship? Have the religious needs of the population been mapped out in order to prepare, precisely, a master plan capable of meeting them? Or are these religious communities being forced, by local political guidelines that want to prevent certain religious minorities from exercising their worship and spread, to take refuge in the dimension of the fact using as they can what they have at their disposal?

If a public administration does nothing to create the conditions for which an inviolable constitutional right such as that of religious freedom can be effectively put into practice, or even puts in place activities to disallow its exercise, it clearly places those religious groups faced with the alternative between giving up their religious freedom or committing a crime.

A situation that is legally unacceptable (and one could perhaps even pose the issue of the exercise of a right as an excuse), a harbinger of social tension and also unacceptable humanly.

In anticipation of a church policy, including of local authorities, aimed at giving fulfillment to the right of religious freedom for all, and not only for some, in the form of a policy for the building of worship at the service of the new religious pluralism, it unfortunately remains only to record the presence conversely, of conflicting attitudes aimed at exacerbating social tensions to which this ordinance is certainly part.

Marco Croce