Luigi Bettazzi

Luigi Bettazzi (26 November 1923 – 16 July 2023) was an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church who was bishop of Ivrea from 1966 to 1999. One of the youngest and most junior participants in the Second Vatican Council, he was one of the original signatories of the Pact of the Catacombs.

Early life Bettazzi was born on 26 November 1923 in Treviso, the third of seven children; his father was an engineer in Turin. He entered the minor seminary before he was ten years old and then studied philosophy and theology at the Gregorian University in Rome before earning a degree in philosophy at the University of Bologna. He taught at the seminary in Bologna. He became vicar general of the Archdiocese of Bologna on 1 September 1963 and received his episcopal consecration on 4 October 1963 from Giacomo Cardinal Lercaro of Bologna, who was one of the four bishops who served as moderators of the Second Vatican Council.

Bettazzi was the most recently created bishop of the Catholic Church and one of the youngest bishops when, on 11 October 1963, he spoke at the second session of the Second Vatican Council on the subject of collegiality. In 2012 he explained his view of the subject: "Once they are consecrated, bishops share with the pope a responsibility for the whole church. This has a rock-solid theological tradition that is often ignored. Collegiality can make the papacy more efficacious rather than weaken it. Papal decisions would be more acceptable if more participation by fellow bishops was involved." Yves Congar described Bettazzi's contributions to the debate as "given at great speed and with fire", calling for clearly expressing "the idea that consecration confers all the powers and that it brings the bishop into the episcopal body" or collegium and does not depend upon any papal action. It met with applause.

On 16 November 1965, he joined 41 other bishops in signing the Pact of the Catacombs, promising in "housing, food and means of transportation to live in accordance with the ordinary manner of our people" and to "renounce forever wealth and the appearance thereof". More than 500 of their peers soon joined them. Bettazzi nevertheless lived in the bishop's residence in Ivrea but never wore the ring Pope Paul VI gave to each Council participant, calling it "ostentatious".

Bettazzi was made bishop of Ivrea in 1966. He retired from his position in Ivrea upon the appointment of his successor on 20 February 1999.

Retirement and death In retirement he expressed his view of what the Council represented: "The council endorsed continuity with the basic doctrines of the church but also meant pastoral discontinuity—adoption of new approaches for new circumstances. The anxiety over doctrinal integrity has produced half-heartedness about pastoral initiatives."

In 2007 he endorsed a proposal of the Italian government to establish legal recognition for same-sex relationships called civil unions. Speaking of homosexuality in April 2015, he said that "the question of sex must be studied, emancipating ourselves from the neo-Platonists who identified sex with spiritual decadence. Why not an expression of the human spirit?"

Bettazzi was made an honorary citizen of Bologna in 2016. He was also the last surviving Italian bishop who participated in the Second Vatican Council. In retirement, he lived in Bologna. Bettazzi died in Albiano d'Ivrea on 16 July 2023, at age 99.