The Decline of Religious Practices and Faith in Italy

Significant drop, drastic decrease, accelerated decline. The negative trend has been underway for decades and for the Church the situation now shows a point of no return. Sociologists speak of the "fading of religious rites" because they involve "an ever smaller share of the Italian population", but also because faith "has a statistically significant influence that is always very limited and weak (if not nonexistent) on the declared behaviors of those who define themselves as regular practitioners", namely those who go to mass with a certain regularity and rely on the sacraments, transmitting faith to their children. This is a complex phenomenon, certainly not new, that has consolidated over time and that, starting from the lockdown - with the decision of the CEI to broadcast masses not in presence, using social media - has stabilized. In practice, the legitimization of TV masses would have accelerated a process already underway which, looking at the statistics and the perspectives of experts, seems to be of no return. Sociologist Luca Diotallevi has just published a book titled La messa è sbiadita (Rubettino, 117 pages, 13 euros) in which he analyzes the historical process of national de-Christianization, concluding that in Italy for the Church the worst nightmare has materialized: a future with semi-empty churches. Diotallevi also questions the "effects of the Bergoglian pontificate" but at the moment, he writes, "attendance at masses by the faithful has not registered signs of a counter-trend neither in quantitative terms nor in morphological terms nor in relation to the transformations already underway in the composition of the universe of regular practitioners". As if to say that the trend was already in progress well before the arrival of Francis. A determining factor in the fracture in the transmission of faith was certainly the distancing of women from the Church. Diotallevi notes punctually that in Italy "it is the woman who traditionally is the protagonist in the transmission of practices and religious beliefs to the younger generations, the transmission of faith depends mainly on them, but the flight of less elderly women from religious ritualism, which has been ongoing for several decades now, is fraught with some consequences for the present and even more so for the future of religion in Italy and therefore also for society and the culture of this country". Furthermore, "The progressive detachment between women and religious rites of the type considered alters and almost erases a constitutive trait of Italian religion. Women are deserting highly institutionalized rites at a faster pace than men. Often the step back taken by women is much larger than that taken by men of the same age". For some time, statistics have reflected an alarming picture. The author writes: "Given that the elderly practice more than younger individuals and given that this gap has been widening for many decades, the superficial perception of the quantity of attendees at religious rites does not accurately reflect the severity of the decline and its implications for the immediate future. What alters the perception is the average aging of the population". Diotallevi emphasizes that the real "perceptual shock is postponed to when the older age groups will leave the scene". Only then will the churches be effectively semi-empty if not empty.