Abstract

The essay critically analyzes the perspective adopted by the Community institutions and also by Italian jurisprudence, regarding the inclusion, for the purposes of exemption from ICI, of spiritually oriented educational initiatives within the common market of school offers. In fact, the prospect does not seem to attribute the right educational significance to the substantial specialty of ethical-religious messages disseminated by religiously inspired schools, and instead assigns decisive importance to the need to safeguard competition, by rigidly leveraging the gratuitousness of the service provided. If it is really necessary to safeguard competition, it would perhaps be appropriate to place the religiously inspired private non-profit schools on the same level as those managed by the State, because they carry out, without profit, a public service of high ethical value. It is therefore believed that there can be no real competition with private entrepreneurs who run schools just to make profits.