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Article 19 of the Constitution imposes the limit of the “public morality” (i.e. accepted principles of public morality) in the exercise of the religion: « …, provided it does not concern the practice of rites contrary to the public morality».
The operativeness of such prohibition is, however, greatly limited because it is reduced to the exclusive ritual context and not to the ideological principles of the cult itself. The notion of the “ public morality” – as that established by the historic sentence of the Constitutional Court N° 9 of the 19th February 1965 – cannot be identified with public morality alone, but must, obligatorily, be retraced to the sexual morality (57). To constitute an offence, it is necessary, therefore, that a rite contrary to the “public morality” is concretely observed; the simple preaching or propaganda of ideas contrary to the principle de quo would not lead to any consequence at the legal level (58). The Constitutional Court held – with the sentence N° 188 of the 8th of July 1975 (59) – that in the Italian Constitutional legal system there is another limitation to religious freedom, in addition to the one just examined; this added “brake” operates on the ground of the freedom of propaganda in religious material and consists in the prohibition of the manifestations of thought of a vilifying nature (60).
Under the 1st paragraph of the Art. 8 of the Constitution (61), all religious faiths are equally free before the Law and can organize themselves according to their own statutes provided that these do not contrast with the Italian Legal System. The constituent legislation, therefore, has sanctioned the freedom – for a religious faith – to «autonomously organize itself according to its own statute» and, therefore, to decide autonomously, also in relation to the State; this power of autonomous decision meets the limit of the «Italian Legal System» with which the above mentioned statutes must not be in contrast.
The major portion of the doctrine is in agreement in believing, more specifically, that such limit must be indentified in the “public order” and in the “public morality”, being included in the range of governmental powers the task of ascertaining that the statutes are in conformity with the Italian Legal System (62). “Public order” is understood as that group of fundamental regulations of the legal system regarding the ethical and political principles, the observance and implementation of which is held as indispensable for the existence of the above mentioned System. These fundamental regulations – general and fundamental principles of the system, and concrete legal regulations – regard the Constitutional Laws of the State, the position of its supreme institutions, the personality and the freedom of the citizens, the norms and institutes of matrimony and the family, and the relations between the social classes (63).
The “public order”, even though it does not constitute a limit in the ambit of the practice of ones own faith (64), it has a determinant value with regard to the freedom of the organization of a religious faith.
Proceeding with an operation of comparison with the other Constitutions, one becomes aware how the Italian one places decisively less restrictive limits compared to the others (65). The Spanish, Bulgarian, Polish, Albanian and Greek Constitutions make explicit reference to the limit of the “public order” and the “public morality”, relative to the constraints provided for on the exercise of religious rites. Moreover, the “Declaration on Religious Intolerance”, the “International Pact on Civil Rights” and the European, American and African Conventions on the Rights of Man provide an absolute statutory reserve with regard to the limitations which can be applied to the free exercise of ones own cult or religion; limitations allowed, if necessary, to safeguard public security, public order, public morality, public health and the fundamental freedoms of the individual (66).
The assumption «All religious faiths are equally free before the law» (Article 8, para 1, Constitution) does not pose a principle of absolute equality (67), the Republican Constitution limits itself to state their equality to freedom alone. With the new Concordat of February 1984, the Catholic religion is not considered the sole religion of the Italian State (68); this innovation – of revolutionary importance – constitutes the base for the “neutrality” of the State in religious matters (69). The Italian State, furthermore, guarantees a treatment which is no different from that reserved for the Catholic Church – above all, at the level of the recognition of freedom – also to other religious faiths with whom it stipulates “understandings” former Article 8, para. 3 of the Constitution; agreements of this kind have been “signed” with the Waldensian and Methodist Churches, with the Adventist Churches, and with the so-called Pentecostal Church, etc. (70).
With regard to all the other non-catholic faiths where no agreements have been signed, the principal regulatory source – apart from the Constitution obviously, is still, today, the Law 25th June 1929, N° 1159 (71) containing “provisions on the exercise of the religions permitted in the State and on the matrimony celebrated before the ministers of the same religions”, together with the Royal Decrees, 28th September 1929 N° 1763 and 28th February 1930 N° 289, which contain the norms of implementation of said Law (72).
The Italian Legal System protects the right of faith and of faiths in general: to be part of a religious sect – even of a satanic nature – is not, in itself, held to be illicit and, as a consequence, forbidden. Much less is it the end of such cults. It is prohibited, instead, that the followers of any sect – in order to pursue a particular religious belief – put into effect conduct which contrast with the regulations of the System, above all, with the criminal one (73).

Plagiarism and the crime of plagiarism

The term “plagio” (plagiarism) derives from the Latin “plagium” – translatable in the Italian language as “theft of person” – and, in Roman law indicated the sale of a man who is known to be free from slavery, in other words, the subtraction, through persuasion, of the slave of someone else (74). Currently, plagiarism is understood to mean a mental and psychological conditioning with consequent deterioration of the personality, resulting from complete social isolation of the individual concerned, placing the plagiarist as the only interlocutor of the plagiarized ‘brainwashed’ subject.
Every individual is vulnerable to plagiarism; no-one can consider himself immune. Often, they are the persons who believe themselves stronger and more intelligent who fall more easily into the trap. The vulnerability to plagiarism is greater in the periods of transition and change that occur throughout life: e.g. when one leaves the family of origin to go to live by oneself; when one changes residence or way of life; when one is without work; when one has to face a sudden illness, concerning oneself or a dear one; in the case of the interruption of an emotional relationship; in moments of loneliness, when far from parents and friends; in the course of adolescence or in the first years of aging; etc., The most hazardous situations are precisely those in which a subject is found who is in search of his own inner balance: for example, during courses of yoga or autogenic training; in seminars on stress and self-control techniques; in the non-traditional religious organizations; etc. These are the “ideal” situations in which subjects belonging to a sect appear – the so-called recruiters – who work with particular resourcefulness to try to find more fertile ground for proselytizing (75).
The principal techniques of plagiarism are:
- the “love bombing”: it is probably the most used technique which gives more lasting effects. The plagiarized subject is showered with attention and love by the members of a sect; subsequently, two or three followers dedicate themselves exclusively to him/her with the objective of eliminating any doubts or hesitation, and reinforcing his desire to belong to the group, involving him in games, songs and other recreational activities; - the “repetition”: the subject is induced – with the pretext of favouring meditation – to repeat obsessively the same words, sing the same strophes and perform a determinate activity continually. Such conduct artificially induces a state of strong suggestibility;
- the “isolation”: the subject is distanced from his family, making contact impossible with people outside of the sect. The plagiarized subject is put in a condition of not being able to evaluate the information with which he is supplied. The only accessible reality becomes that of the group;
- the “deprivation of sleep”: this technique is often associated with that of the repetition. It is presented to the subject as necessary for not interrupting the state of concentration reached. With it, the plagiarized is weakened physically and rendered even more vulnerable (76).
Once the subject is adequately “plagiarized” and weakened, he is ready to be “programmed” – for the purpose of entering in fully to become part of the sect – through various stages: the isolation, the indoctrination and the maintenance (77).
In criminal law, plagiarism was considered a crime – under Art. 603 of the Italian Criminal Code (Rocco Code) – which provided for the penalty of imprisonment for 5 to 15 years for anyone who has submitted «a person to their power in such a way as to reduce him to a total state of subjection».
It was the Fascist legislation to introduce, for the first time, into the Italian Legal System, the crime of plagiarism as a case distinct from the crime of “reduced into slavery” (Art. 600 Criminal Code) (78). Three different interpretive concepts of plagiarism, therefore, were elaborated, chronologically succeeding one another in the following order:
- plagiarism consists in the establishment of a physical-material dominion with corresponding subjection of the same type – substantially equivalent to slavery;
- the crime of plagiarism consists in the establishment of a psychic dominion induced through suggestion – which corresponds to a subjection of the same type – with consequent hetero-direction of the will and the possible determination of a state of unsound mind (non compos mentis);
- for plagiarism – and this is the most modern concept – is understood as psychological conditioning with deterioration of the personality, following the reduction of the plagiarized subject to total isolation from the “rest of the world”, placing the plagiarizer in the position of being the exclusive interlocutor of the plagiarized person (79).
The Law has been steering essentially towards the second conception and, consequently, the Constitutional Court has proceeded to the cancellation of the relative incriminatory norm (Art. 603 Criminal Code) from the Legal System. The problem came to the fore around thirty years ago when, following a plea of unconstitutionality, the Constitutional Court – with the famous sentence N° 96 of the 8th June 1981 – abolished the crime of plagiarism from the Criminal Legal System as being in contrast «with the principle of compulsoriness of the case contained in the absolute reservation of the law in criminal matters, formally sanctioned in Article 25 of the Constitution »(80) (Sentence Constitutional Court N° 96/1981).
The Constitutional Court, therefore, sanctioned the vagueness of the formulation of the criminal nature of the case in point, that is, the crime of plagiarism «citing, essentially, the non-verifiability of the fact considered by the case in point, the impossibility, however, of its ascertainment with rational-logical criteria, the intolerable risk of arbiters of the judging body» (81). The sentence de quo, furthermore, established that «among psychically normal individuals, the externalization, by a human being, of ideas and convictions on other human beings can provoke the acceptance of the ideas and convictions so externalized and give rise to a state of psychic subjection in the sense that this acceptance constitutes a transfer on others of the product of a psychic activity of the doer and, thus, a limitation of the determinism of the subject. This limitation, being scientifically identified and ascertained, can give rise to a typical situation psychic dependence which can also reach high levels, for varying lengths of time, as in the case of a love relationship, of the relation between priest and believer, between teacher and pupil, between doctor and patient, and can also lead to relationships of reciprocal influence. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to individuate on a practical level and distinguish for the purpose of legal consequences – with regard to hypotheses like the one in examination – the psychic activity of persuasion from that, also psychic, of suggestion. There are no sure criteria to separate and qualify one and the other activity and to ascertain the exact borders between them». (Sentence. Constitutional Court N° 96/1981).
The only convicted person in the history of the crime of plagiarism was Aldo Braibanti who, in the first years of the 70’s, induced two youths – Piercarlo Toscani and Giovanni Sanfratello, both 19 years of age at the time of the facts – to have homosexual relations with him. Braibante used his philosophical and artistic ideas to fascinate – or it would be more appropriate to say ‘to sway’ – the two boys. The artiste, arrested in December 1967, was condemned on July 14th 1968 by the Criminal Court of Rome, to 9 years imprisonment. On the 28th November 1969, the Court of Appeal of Rome reduced the sentence to 4 years and, in 1971, the Supreme Court confirmed the conviction. In the meantime, Braibanti, benefiting from a sentence reduction for good behaviour was released in December 1969 (82).
Subsequently, also Emilio Grasso – a priest belonging to the charismatic Movement – was accused by certain parents to have plagiarized their underage children; it was on this occasion that the competent Magistrate asked for the intervention of the Constitutional Court to assess whether the norm de quo was in contrast with the principles of the Constitution. After the Court decision (Sentence N°96/1981), the priest was exonerated of all charges (83).
Thirty years from the abolition of the crime of plagiarism, however, the need is increasingly perceived, in the social community, for protection of the individual personality of man and his psycho-physical integrity: in synthesis, the necessity of a safeguard of the identity, unique and unrepeatable of the individual. This means, in primis, protect the human being – during the formation and development of his personality – from “obsessive” interference; and, also, protect him from the various forms of behaviour which can compromise his integrity, that of his psych as well as his social functionality. Furthermore, all these needs – aside from finding implicit recognition in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution – constitute the basic presupposition so that those rights to freedom can be actually enjoyed and the duties of solidarity that the Constitution guarantees and imposes conscientiously fulfilled (84).
In response to these considerations, there are those who have argued that the singularity of the “I” constitutes a pure ideal aspiration without a concrete confirmation in reality (85) and on the point, polemics of a philosophical and mystic character abound.
Placing ourselves, however, beyond sterile debate – although sharing a certain mysteriousness of the human personality, – it should be said that it is precisely experience that shows us that the personal identity can be broken. Indeed, it is exactly when facing the single injurious episode that the “reality of the value constituted by the individual personality emerges, even in its conceptual dimension (86).
In the last half-decade, in Italy, just in the wake of such ideas, various Bills to reintroduce the crime of plagiarism (87) have been lodged in Parliament, but such projects have not been taken up due to the contemporary occurrence of significant issues relevant to criminal law: the case of the crime proposed was not presented with ascertainable criteria and scientific methods and, furthermore, exposed the citizen to possible risks and misuse.

Conclusion

The Satanic sects represent a subset of sects which, globally understood, constitute a phenomenon, even though, not alarming, (88) however, worthy of consideration insofar as fed by a sort of post-modern mysticism (89).
Also the European Council – whilst acknowledging the difficulty of reaching a definition of “sect” and of “religion” – dealt with the argument in two Resolutions in 1992 and 1996, and suggested favouring a greater integration, but also, in light of the various and serious crimes connected, not to concede the status of religious faith too easily or automatically (90).
The Italian System, regarding religious freedom, presents itself as advanced and very tolerant. This trend, even though estimable and considerably respectful of the rights of the person, does not always constitute a solid “brake” to the development of the phenomenon de quo (91). The configuration of the crime of plagiarism would represent, without a doubt, a valid instrument to protect the integrity of the person and limit the capacity of the sects to proselytize (92). In fact, with the known sentence N° 96/1981 of the Constitutional Court, the crime of plagiarism failed (Art. 603, Criminal Code), but not plagiarism, which remains a reality in the ambit of interpersonal relations.
Without any regret for the abolished case – which was juridically indefinable and source of possible misuse before the Courts – it is necessary to recognize that a void has been created in the protection of the personality with respect to the plagiaristic dynamics (93), a void which, in some way, should be filled, despite the awareness that the task of the Legislature is not of easy solution, inasmuch as it must try to conciliate the principle of religious freedom with that of the protection of the integrity of the citizen: both extremely important and of constitutional status.