The Sociocultural Change Under the Sacred Canopy in Italy

Abstract

The article describes the sociocultural change under the sacred canopy in a country with a deep Catholic tradition in Europe, focusing on the indicators of secularization in Italy, drawn from the most recent national surveys. One of the most significant results is the increase in nuns and spiritual but not religious people, especially among the younger generations. Nonetheless, for the majority of Italians, Catholicism is still part of the social framework of collective memory. At the same time, immigration is contributing to a changing religious geography: Italian society is transitioning from a monopoly regime (a dominant church-based religion) to one characterized by the pluralism of faiths.

1. Introduction

Can Italy still be considered a Catholic country? The answer is not so simple. In fact, from a socio-religious point of view, the process of secularization has not stopped over the last thirty years; on the contrary, it has intensified. At the same time, the Catholic Church’s ability to organize society in its own image and likeness has weakened. Nevertheless, Catholicism continues to be not only the framework of collective memory, but also a source of social solidarity available to believers and lay people, to those who are actively involved in the Catholic Church and to those who no longer have a religious home, orphans of the great ideological narratives of the twentieth century.

The article is divided into four parts. The first part briefly reconstructs the historical process of nation-building in Italy, focusing in particular on the relationship between the state and the Catholic Church. The second part summarizes the main indicators of secularization, while the third part illustrates the factors that determine the final crisis of the parish model. The latter focuses on the change in religious geography brought about by the arrival of women and men from more than 180 countries around the world in the long cycle of migration that began in 1972. Reading these four parts in sequence, I describes the sociocultural change under the sacred canopy of Catholicism. The common thread linking these four parts can be summarized as follows: Italy is no longer a Catholic society; at the same time, most Italians continue to identify themselves culturally as Catholic. Furthermore, the Counter-Reformation Tridentine model of the societas christiana—a confessional, territorial and clerical church—has entered into crisis; at the same time, parishes continue to offer social, educational and cultural services that are appreciated even by those who are no longer practicing Catholics. Finally, Catholicism is becoming a minority religion in a society that is becoming increasingly religiously pluralistic. The ecclesiastical authorities are aware of this trend, while a section of the political elite, neo-nationalists, see Catholicism as a moral bulwark defending national identity. Some Italians would be willing to move beyond the Concordat regime that still governs relations between the state and the Church and continues to guarantee the Church privileged positions, while others, leaning towards the center-right, fear that moving beyond this regime would open the door to Islamic invasion and the loss of the nation’s Christian roots.

We are therefore faced with a puzzle (Diotallevi 2017): A secularized country, tending towards post-Catholicism, ready to live in a secular state, but positively oriented towards religions (and no longer just towards Catholicism), led by a political elite that uses Catholicism as an ethno-national flag.

Faced with the puzzle that is Italy, I therefore prefer to adopt the perspective of complexity, as theorized by Morin (1990). In other words, I think this paradigm is more useful than others for understanding the paradox of a secularized society that continues to represent itself as Catholic, pluralistic from a religious point of view despite internal differences in the way Catholicism is lived and practiced, of a state that could assume the posture of a post-secular state, even if it continues to function as a state compromised for ideological reasons with the Catholic Church and, finally, the paradox of paradoxes, with a Church aware of the challenges of the times and its loss of centrality and social plausibility. The paradigm of complexity prevents us from considering secularization as a linear process, attributable to a single prevailing cause (modernization) and summarized in a simplistic formula (such as secularization equals the end of religion) (Pace 2011).

The Italian case shows, instead, that we are dealing with different phenomena, which have developed at different times and at different levels with varying degrees of intensity. These phenomena are connected and interconnected, characterized by circular relationships. The loss of social credibility and moral authority of the Catholic Church is evident both in people’s attitudes and in the reduced role of parishes in “building community” at the local level. In some respects, the multi-level approach to secularization developed by Dobbelaere (2004, 2014) can be applied to the Italian case, albeit with some caution: from micro to macro, passing through meso, it is not necessarily true that the modes and forms of secularization are homogeneous.

In the Italian case, at the individual level, society is becoming secularized, but the idea that “we are a Catholic country” persists in social representation and collective memory. This means that at the macro level (societal secularization), the dominant political elites are very cautious in promoting the secularization of the state and its institutions.

2. Roman and Catholic Issues: A Call to History

With the definitive crisis in 1992 of the Catholic-inspired Christian Democracy party (Pace 1995, pp. 29–32), the terms of two issues that had characterized Italian history since 1861 were overcome: the Roman and the Catholic issues. Until the advent of fascism, the Catholic Church considered the Italian state to be the enemy that had destroyed the Papal States and conquered Rome, the eternal city of the Holy See, by force of arms. Consequently, at least until the early decades of the twentieth century, the popes had forbidden Catholics from exercising their right to vote. If they had gone to the polls, they would have legitimized a state dominated by liberals, anti-clericals and Freemasons. In principle, therefore, Italy is a secular state, built on a civil society that is still predominantly rural and deeply Catholic, thanks to the ramifications of parishes spread throughout the country. From this point of view, Catholicism was a form of social civilization that unified Italy from north to south, even before the idea of nationhood and the need to fight for its independence took shape in the Risorgimento imagination.

Fascism resolved the Roman and Catholic questions technically with a historic compromise with the Church. I am referring to the Concordat of 1929. We are just a few years away from the March on Rome by the Fasci di Combattimento in 1922. Fascism was initially a secular and anti-clerical movement. Mussolini had in mind a state capable of imposing a new anthropological model: disciplined and united around its Duce, aware of being part of a nation that was the heir to the fasces of ancient Rome. The Rome of the Popes did not initially form part of this plan. It did so when Mussolini realized that, to build a nation devoted to its leader, he would have to come to terms with those who had shaped the homo catholicus for centuries, dreaming of creating a christiana societas that was neither liberal nor socialist. In the eyes of a former anti-clerical socialist like Mussolini, the construction of a fascist societas would have had a better chance of success if it had the support of the Church. The Duce therefore took the risk of closing the Roman question and trying to compromise Catholicism in the process of building the fascist regime (Scoppola 1971; Traniello 2007; Gentile 2008; Guasco 2013; Ceci 2013).

The Catholic Church accepted the compromise because it saw the Catholic religion recognized as the state religion. In conclusion, fascism gave rise to a semi-secular state: it wanted to establish itself as a secular state, but at the same time had to show itself to be positively oriented towards recognizing Catholicism’s public function as the guardian of Italian national identity in harmony with and in support of the Mussolini regime’s nationalist project. Until all this became apparent, the Italian state, defined in opposition circles, now reduced to silence, as a clerical-fascist state, was like a two-faced Janus: the Roman salute and the crucifix (De Felice 1968, p. 384). An Italian-style hybrid, far from the Nazi totalitarian model.

With the end of fascism and the advent of the Republic in 1946, the new Constitution established a secular state. However, it still recognized the historical role of the Catholic Church and its moral and civil primacy in society, so much so that the Concordat was not abolished; on the contrary, it was solemnly referred to in Article 11 of the Constitution. This role was strengthened during the Cold War years (1948–1960). From 18 April 1948 until the early 1990s, the political scene was firmly occupied by a religiously inspired party of Catholics, who could count on the Catholic vote. However, the Italian state did not become a confessional state, but Catholicism continued to be the narrative backdrop of the national consciousness, a collective myth. Italy, the cradle of Catholicism, as was said during the heated election campaigns between 1948 and 1956, could not be led by communists, atheists and those linked to the USSR. Despite the presence of a strong Communist Party and other programmatically secular parties, the representation of Italy as a Catholic country persisted for a long time (Cartocci 2011).

3. The Turning Point

The first political sign that something was changing in society was the referendum on divorce (1974), followed by a second, even more explicit one on abortion in 1981. It can be said that between these two dates, the spell of the myth of Catholic Italy was broken. In that very short period of history (less than ten years), secularization from below was reflected in politics. In 1978, a non-Italian pope, the Polish Karol Wojtyła, was elected for the first time. Under his pontificate, Catholic Rome would once again become a triumphant church for its final, decisive contribution to the fall of the Soviet Union. Compared to that of the Italian popes, his Church would be different. Italy was still close, but this pope’s gaze was turned towards the world. In the Italian collective imagination, a slow process of disconnection between religion and Catholicism began, which we see emerging more clearly today. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) had already stimulated the minds and hearts of those who imagined a religion in dialogue with others, a Church respectful of the autonomy of worldly spheres, from economics to politics, confident in the responsibility of the laity to manage them, no longer intervening directly and indirectly, claiming to guide them as if they were docile believers in a state of minority. For many Catholics at the time, the conviction had already matured that a new age of enlightenment was dawning, which, to paraphrase Kant’s famous essay on the Enlightenment (Kant 1784, p. 156), meant precisely “coming out of minority”, freeing themselves from the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s claim to reserve the right to have the final say on everything, not only on doctrine, but also on the rules to be followed in the secular sphere. For this generation of Catholics, professing a religious faith no longer necessarily meant obeying ecclesiastical authority when it came to engaging in social and political action.

In this regard, we can speak of an initial internal secularization that did not lead to a mass secession from Catholicism. In politics, this sentiment was expressed in the idea of a Catholic party that was not confessional, as well as a state that was attentive to the reasons of religious faiths but secular. Most of Italian people continued to remain within the Catholic universe, but internal differences and polarization became more pronounced. For example, voting for the Catholic party was no longer perceived as a moral duty; voting for left-wing parties, once considered by the Catholic Church to be enemies of God or viewed with suspicion because of their collectivist ideas, became a choice that could be made freely. Secularization in Italy, therefore, is not measured solely by trends in religious practice or the curve of vocations and priestly ordinations. In the political arena, the heretical imperative (Berger 1979) will prevail: if the bishops say to vote for the Christian Democrats, many Catholics will think it is permissible to disobey. In the Italian case, this means that the definitive decline of the Catholic-inspired party in 1992 marks the transition from a society that “cannot fail to call itself Catholic” to another that is beginning to think of itself as differently religious.

The next step, which will take place from the 1980s onwards, will be from accentuated internal pluralism within the same religion (Catholicism is no longer unanimous and Catholics are no longer united by theology and politics) to the real diversity of multiple religions. This transition was facilitated by the relatively long cycle of migration that began in the early 1970s and continued with considerable intensity throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Religious diversity, with all its internal nuances, which became visible in everyday life, changed the common Catholic sentiment. Catholicism can no longer be imagined as the only possible religion or, in the terms of Alfred Schütz’s phenomenology (Schütz 1967, p. 250), the taken-for-granted horizon of meaning.

4. The Secularization Indices

These brief historical notes serve to outline the framework within which to place the study of the Italian case with regard to socio-religious change: on the one hand, society shows signs of increasing secularization, especially among the younger generations; on the other hand, this process manifests itself in a relative decline in Catholicism, but not in a loss of meaning and interest in what sociologists of religion conventionally call spirituality without religion (Flanagan and Jupp 2007; Ammerman 2013; Fuller and Parsons 2018; Hautman and Watts 2024), individual paths of spiritual search that no longer necessarily pass through the great avenues opened up by historical religions. This is a change due to exogenous causes, which overlaps with what we have described when talking about the peculiarity of Italian Catholicism. The long-term effects of this double contingency, which was unpredictable until the early 1980s, on the configuration of the religious geography in Italy today may be varied.

Two, in particular, appear to be relevant. One concerns the micro-social level: the trend towards religious individualization, by choice and not by social conformity, is consolidated thanks to the plurality of religious offerings (other than Catholicism) available to people. The second important effect concerns the macro-social level, the governance of diversity. Faced with the new religious landscape, which is increasingly pluralistic and complex, the state is beginning to think differently about policies for recognizing religion: it cannot continue to think Ptolemaically, with the sun (the Catholic Church, at the center, immobile) around which small planets (the historical and new minorities) revolve. It is not easy to overcome the political and legal logic that has guided entire generations of politicians in Italy, according to which there is a majority religion and everything else falls under the category of minority, which may or may not be recognized depending on the political orientation of the government in power. In fact, arriving at legislation that realizes the constitutional principle of equality of all religions before the law, limited by the existence of a device such as the Concordat, implies a cultural revolution—Copernican—which is only just beginning.

To use an image, churches are emptying, but religious sentiment is not disappearing; it is recomposing itself in other forms, taking paths other than those once built and controlled by the Catholic Church. At the same time, new places of worship are springing up to accommodate the world’s major religions. Metaphor aside, secularization does not cause the death of God or the eclipse of the sacred. Outside the Catholic perimeter, other religions are establishing themselves in society. Furthermore, the very way of believing has changed. For a quarter of the Italian population (Garelli 2020), in fact, the search for meaning, when it manifests itself, is no longer oriented within the cognitive and emotional space historically traced by the Catholic Church. Similarly, religions that were perceived as distant thirty years ago are becoming closer to everyday life, especially for the younger generations. A historical phase is beginning in which the principle of social solidarity, which in the past found inspiration mainly in the two mass subcultures of Catholicism and socialism (Marxist and reformist), is being enriched by other worldviews and social norms. Religious pluralism is eroding the monopoly of the Catholic Church; for now, at the micro-social level, it is encouraging the proliferation of many experiences of cooperation between people of different faiths or without faith or who are spiritually searching for meaning.

5. The Mass Is Over

In 1985, Nanni Moretti’s film La Messa è finita (The Mass Is Over) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It told the story of a priest who, after years of missionary work in Latin America, returns to Rome and is sent to a parish on the outskirts of the capital. Here he sees how much society has changed: the previous parish priest has started a family; his elderly father has fallen in love with a very young woman and left his wife, who, in despair, has committed suicide; finally, his sister has decided to have an abortion. Shocked, the young priest announced one Sunday to the small group of parishioners that he had decided to leave and return to a remote mission in Patagonia. A glimpse of real life in a post-Catholic Italy, marked by the secularization of customs and religious decline.

The film’s narrative plot is a good excuse to move from storytelling to the accounts of secularization, already clear at the end of the 1980s and even more evident in the light of the most recent research conducted between 2015 and 2020 (Cipriani 2020; Diotallevi 2017, 2025; Garelli 2020).

Let us consider two indicators of secularization. One, quantitative, concerns the trend in religious practice, the other refers to religious language and imagery, studied using qualitative methods. This series of indicators, which measure the attitudes and behaviors of ordinary people, will be supplemented by data concerning the organizational strength of the Catholic Church, as an institution that has functioned secularly by relying on a substantial number of professionals of sacred matters (secular clergy, monks and nuns) and an associative network for lay people which, at least until the 1970s, was massive, differentiated corporately by age, gender, trades and professions.

First of all, religious practice is in constant decline, with a significant acceleration in the last ten years, as certified by the Institute of Statistics, which since 1993 has been conducting an annual survey on various aspects of people’s daily lives, including religious practice, on a national sample of 20,000 families and 50,000 individuals (aged 18 and over) (ISTAT 2022). In 1993, the percentage of regular Sunday Mass attendees was 37.3; in 2019, it fell to 23.7. Diotallevi (2023), who conducted a secondary analysis of these data, noted that the decline in regular attendance has not been offset, as in the past, by an increase in the number of occasional practitioners, those who said they went to Mass occasionally or on solemn religious holidays, such as Easter and Christmas. Those who no longer attend Mass seem to have made a definitive choice to leave the religion of their birth, Catholicism. Furthermore, and this is the most interesting data, the decline in practice is even more striking when we look at the younger generations. Among those who are now between 20 and 24 years of age, the decline is drastic: less than 10% attend. Finally, among the younger segments of the population, the gender difference that, even in the 1990s, distinguished young women (more practicing) from their male peers (less practicing) no longer explains the different religious behaviors (Palmisano and Pannofino 2021; Bichi and Rovati 2020). All this means not only that gender is statistically insignificant, but also that the process of secularization is more pronounced among young women.

We are witnessing a gradual decline in the Catholic institution’s position in Italian society. In other words, the religious socialization of the younger generations in Italy is still a social fact: for about thirteen years of their lives, they are taught the Catholic faith in parishes, spend part of their free time in Catholic-inspired environments and associations, and attend weekly (Catholic) religion classes in high numbers (decreasing only in the final years of secondary school). Therefore, from the point of view of religious provision, there is a massive investment in education, which, however, proves to be poorly remunerative for the institution itself if, a few years after their first communion (around the age of 13–14), adolescents begin to distance themselves from Catholic circles, reduce their attendance at Mass, are happy to stay in class if they can talk freely about various human issues with their Catholic religion teacher, and begin to become atheists, as two Italian sociologists (Garelli 2016; Castegnaro 2010) claim.

Talking about atheism is probably a provocation of which the authors themselves are aware, since the younger generations are adopting an attitude towards the religion of their birth that is initially increasingly free, oscillating between belief and non-belief, and subsequently one of growing indifference towards the institution of the Church. For more than half of the population between the ages of 15 and 25 (Matteo 2017; Bienni et al. 2013), this indifference does not mean a lack of interest in what sociologists of religion call spirituality (Heelas and Woodhead 2008; Giordan and Pace 2012; Giordan and Sbalchiero 2020). People no longer feel Catholic by tradition. A significant portion of the younger generations, as well as a third of the adult population, believe by choice and, consequently, within the subjective limits of that choice. Therefore, one can still call oneself Catholic, even if one is critical of many aspects of the Church’s doctrinal and moral teachings or holds opinions that are decidedly opposed to those of the hierarchy (from the parish priest to the bishop and the Pope).

The de-institutionalization of belief in a country like Italy therefore constitutes a real historical break: there is no longer a religion that pervasively and dominantly covers all stages of a person’s life cycle, nor is there a community religion that continuously links faith, social ethics and politics. The traditional cultural and social hegemony that the Church exercised over Italian society has entered into crisis precisely because individuals choose whether, in what and to what extent to believe. On the one hand, the figure of the religious bricoleur (Altglas 2014) is becoming established, while on the other, we can speak of a prêt-à-porter religion, of ready-made religious styles or habits, available in the crowded market of symbolic and spiritual goods, to be worn for a certain period of time and easy to change when the fashion passes (Berzano 2017).

The loss of grip on individual consciences by an institution such as the Catholic Church implies not only the individualization of choices to believe or not to believe (or even to remain in between these two polarities) (Stolz et al. 2015; Hervieu-Léger and Schlegel 2022), but also the deterritorialization of the feeling of religious belonging. In simpler terms, this means the decline of the social function of a place such as the parish, which in the past was a basic cell of Italian society, where religion became a social fact. In sociological terms, this decline means the unravelling of the social bonds that Catholicism once managed to create. This process is like what Bauman (2000) has identified in more general terms as liquid modernity.

The two dimensions mentioned above, practice and belonging, serve as litmus tests for the transformation of the religious field in Italy. For entire generations, Catholicism has been not only a universe of beliefs and practices (often syncretized with ancient rituals, which bore visible traces of magical-sacred beliefs), as well as widely shared rules of moral and social conduct, but also a sort of koiné, a common language that managed to unify the imagination and the words to express it of an entire people, otherwise divided and differentiated by dialects, local cultures, parochialism and so on. In a recent survey, Cipriani (2020), using sophisticated tools for qualitative analysis of the language of interviewees on topics related to religious experience, showed how fragmented and uncertain the vocabulary used by subjects to describe religious feelings, beliefs and behaviors has become. A once familiar (religious) lexicon appears impoverished and, above all, no longer supported by a socio-linguistic pact, certified by an authoritative source such as what was once called the Holy Roman Church.

Finally, observing secularization from the point of view of the ecclesiastical institution, the important factor that measures the novelty of the times we are describing is the gradual reduction in ecclesiastical personnel. It is worth paying attention to this element, since Catholic Italy was able to remain so until a few decades ago thanks to a significant number of women and men who chose to “work in the Lord’s vineyard”, full-time and with absolute dedication to the institutional aims of the Church. The “work” I am talking about was not only of a specialist nature (the care of souls and all related activities). It was also real social work that made possible, as in few other countries in Europe (Belgium, Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Spain), the realization of an impressive series of social works (from cooperatives to popular banks, from welfare institutions for the poor to nurseries and kindergartens, from Catholic-inspired trade unions to political parties, such as the People’s Party after the First World War and, after the Second World War, the more powerful Christian Democracy). This long-standing social capital nourishes and inspires the so-called Third Sector, which includes forms of social volunteering, economic cooperatives, solidarity initiatives subsidiary to the public system, and genuine social enterprises.

For at least twenty years, the organization of the Catholic Church in Italy has been suffering from a threefold crisis: few new entrants (decline in vocations), ageing personnel (clergy, religious men and women), and an overload of duties on the remaining available workforce. Just one example: as elsewhere in Europe, the number of parishes without a parish priest is growing, so that one priest must provide essential services (masses and various ceremonies, baptisms, weddings and funerals) to several parishes, with a consequent weakening of the bonds between a community of faithful and what was once their parish priest. In 2020, the 25,595 parishes still active were entrusted to the care of 15,595 parish priests (Istituto Sostentamento del Clero 2021). In 2019, there were 32,000 priests (one priest for every 1900 inhabitants); thirty years ago, there were 38,000. This represents a loss of 16%, which may not seem significant, but becomes more telling when we look to the future. The perspective changes, in fact, if we analyze the ageing process. Fifteen per cent of priests today are over 80 years old, compared to four per cent in 1990. Similarly, priests over the age of 70 accounted for 22% of the total in 2019; today they account for 36%. Seminaries are emptying, and there is no guaranteed replacement for clergy who, due to reaching the age limit or physiological decline, can no longer be active in the life of the Church. Relatively young clergy (under 40) accounted for 14% of the total in 1990; this has fallen further to 10%. In conclusion, the average age of the clergy was 57 in 1990, 60 in 2010 and 61 in 2019: one third are over 70, one fifth are over 80 and only 10% are under 40. This trend reflects the demographic decline that has characterized Italian society for some years now and, therefore, even if the Catholic Church were to increase the number of priests and nuns from the southern hemisphere (today there are about 2500; twenty years ago there were a thousand), as has been the case for some years now, it would not be able to counteract the process described above and ensure the natural replacement of personnel close to the mentality and lifestyle of the Italian population (Diotallevi 2005).

6. Unexpected Religious Pluralism

Socio-religious change in Italy also depends on an exogenous factor: migratory mobility, which favors the transition from a society with a Catholic monopoly to one characterized by unprecedented and unexpected religious pluralism. The internal differentiation within Catholicism and the new religious diversity brought by migrants are two different social phenomena. The new religions that women and men, arriving from more than 140 countries around the world, bring with them, in turn, have all the nuances and internal differences in their own history. For now, they are religious minorities that join the historical ones (from the Waldensian Church to the main Churches of the Reformation, in addition to the Jewish communities, which are decreasing in number year after year). The new wave thus adds to the widespread belief in public opinion that we have entered a post-Catholic historical phase. This process can be compared to what has already happened in Ireland (Ganiel 2016) and is happening, albeit more gradually, in Poland (Guzek 2019; Niechcial 2025; Szczerbiak 2025).

Maps showing the presence of a plurality of religions other than that of birth (Catholicism) reveal how the religious geography of Italy is changing. Religious diversity is beginning to become visible in cities as well as in small urban centers located in active industrial districts or in areas where the exploitation of low-cost immigrant labor in semi-slave-like conditions in agriculture is most intense. Similarly, a new generation of future Italian citizens belonging to different religious faiths is emerging.

Elsewhere (Pace 2013a), I have used the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, attributed to Zeno of Elea (5th century BC), to describe with a metaphor the progressive transformation of the religious landscape in Italy, dominated by a majority religion, such as Catholicism, with the presence of historical minorities (from the Jewish to the Protestant). If Achilles is the symbol of a Church such as the Catholic Church that feels invincible, the migratory movement is like a tortoise that slowly (and incredibly) begins to compete with Achilles.

Today, forty years after the first wave of largely immigration, this perception has changed, in the sense that Achilles (the Catholic Church), to continue with the metaphor, is aware of its weakness. Whereas before it could think it could somehow counteract the secularization of Italian society by changing the ways of communicating the religious message or renewing the liturgy, opening up to dialogue with the secular world and, in general, revising the many positions of doctrinal intransigence taken in the past, the movement of the tortoise is, in many respects, unstoppable. Outside of metaphor, the religious field in Italy will no longer be permanently occupied by a religion in a monopoly position, as is already the case today. The demographic trend seems irreversible: there will be many more Italian men and women (descendants of first-generation immigrants) of Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Pentecostal, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist faiths, with all the different nuances and internal differences that each of these labels covers, with differentiated and, at times, polarized religious experiences. This is a cultural and religious super-diversity (Vertovec 2007) that is completely unknown to a country which, at least from the point of view of the social representation of its cultural and religious identity, continued to imagine itself as Catholic until a few years ago.

According to the latest ISMU (Initiatives and Studies on Multiethnicity 2023) report on migration in 2023, there were six million residents of foreign origin in Italy in 2022, a slight increase (almost 90,000 people compared to the previous year). This figure refers to those who have a regular residence permit or have obtained Italian citizenship; to which must be added approximately 500,000 people considered irregulars. In percentage terms, adding the two figures together, immigrants account for 10% and a little more than the total population. For at least five years now, there has been no significant growth. Almost seven out of ten migrants have a permanent residence permit and more than 60% come from countries outside the European Union. Sixty-six point seven per cent of minors of foreign origin were born in Italy but must wait until they turn eighteen to apply for citizenship. In 2021 (the latest official data available), more than 120,000 people acquired citizenship (a decrease of 7 percentage points compared to the previous year). There are 900,000 pupils of immigrant origin in state schools (again with a slight decrease). There are 189 different nationalities of origin: a rough indication that religious differences exist next door, in the local market, in a hospital ward, in a prison, in classrooms, in municipal social services, and so on.

To measure the presence of different religious communities, still relying on estimates, which, by definition, are approximate (Ciocca 2019; Giordan et al. 2025). They do not provide us with precise information on the organization of these communities and, above all, on the religious experience of the people who actually belong to them. The only data that have so far made it possible to measure, with our feet firmly on the ground, the territorial spread of new religions concern places of worship (Pace 2013b). This is a rough indicator that reveals an initial form of socio-religious aggregation. A map of these sacred spaces is still far from complete and accurate. These places are not yet visible to the naked eye. At least our (native) eye, lazily accustomed to recognizing a Catholic church at a glance, is not yet accustomed to focusing with the same certainty on buildings that identify the presence of religions other than the majority one. Even the eye wants its share in religions. The eye reflects and records an orderly world outside us, where things familiar to us are located.

In the

Table 1. Places of worship and estimates of immigrant’s religious affiliation (2021).

Religion	Places of Worship	Affiliation
Islam	820 *	1,800,000
Orthodox Churches **	486	1,600,000
Pentecostal African Churches	858	500,000
Sikh	52	90,000
Buddhism	162	80,000
Hindu	2	1500
Total	2380	4,071,500 ***

legenda: * including six mosques in the strict sense, the other places are prayer rooms or musallayat. ** (Giordan and Guglielmi 2018, p. 59): Orthodox Churches refer to Churches affiliated with the Patriarchates of Moscow and Constantinople, various autocephalous national Churches—Romanian, Moldovan, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian—and, finally, Eastern Churches such as the Coptic and Ethiopian Churches. *** estimates by Caritas-Migrantes (2023).

below, I have summarized the number of places of worship of the main new religions present in Italy as of 2020.

Twenty years ago, there were only 70 Orthodox parishes and around 200 Muslim prayer halls. Popes and imams have acquired a social role, partly recognized by the state for certain spiritual services that these figures can provide outside their respective canonical areas of competence. Compared to Catholic clergy, popes and imams are on average younger than Catholic priests. Finally, if we were to group the different affiliations according to the distribution of the major religions in the world, immigrants of Christian origin and confession are in the majority (55%). Of these, 17% are Catholic. Muslims represent about 30%. A significant proportion of people were born and raised in countries where the majority religion is Buddhism (as in the case of Sri Lanka), accounting for 3.5%; followed by the Sikh community (the second most populous in Europe with about 80,000 members) (Bertolani 2010) and the Hindu community. Finally, the table does not include data on the various Latin American neo-Pentecostal churches and Chinese Christian groups, as there is a lack of extensive and detailed research at the national level.

Over the next thirty years, given the sharp slowdown in the demographic growth of the native population, we can expect an even more visible and profound shift towards a society with high religious diversity, which will have an impact on all areas of community life (Frisina 2007, 2013; Bossi and Marrocculi 2022).

7. Italy: Between Secularization and Religious Pluralism

On the one hand, therefore, Italy is a secularized society like other traditionally Catholic societies in Europe (Perez-Agote 2012; Dobbelaere and Perez-Agote 2015), while on the other, religion, far from fading into the background, continues to play a renewed public role. To understand this puzzle, we need to briefly recall in what sense we can speak of a post-secular society, following the theories of Habermas and Ratzinger (2006); Habermas (2006, 2008); Casanova (1994, 2007).

Habermas’ contribution to post-secular theory is particularly useful for understanding the peculiarity of the relationship between religion (Catholicism), the secular state and politics in the post-1989 historical phase, when the Berlin Wall fell. In Italy, that date marked the beginning of a crisis in the political system that had governed the country for sixty years. Metaphorically speaking, the small internal wall that had divided Italian society along Cold War lines was no longer there. This crisis in the political system also affected the Catholic Church, which could no longer count on a party such as the Christian Democrats (DC). The historic compromise between the Catholic Church and the state, established by the new republican constitution of 1948, recognizing Catholicism as the primary religion of Italian men and women, had shaped a formally secular but essentially pro-Catholic state. The crisis in the political system, centered on the hegemony of the Catholic party, set in motion a process that is still ongoing. What matters in this process is the change in the pastoral strategy of the Italian Catholic Church: with the demise of the DC, the idea of the Church’s (direct and indirect) disengagement from the political arena has gained strength within the Church. The Church thus freed itself from its historic compromise with Italian politics and gradually established itself as an authoritative voice and public moral conscience, leaving lay people (Catholic men and women) to act independently in the political sphere. In this way, the Catholic Church gained in authority in the public sphere, losing the power to influence the political orientations of citizens. In turn, faced with this shift on the part of the Church, the political elite gradually freed themselves from the idea of a state bound by a special pact with Catholicism.

By withdrawing from political intervention, the Catholic Church finds itself more at ease in a pluralistic society where it is no longer possible to impose the truths of faith through political power, shaping a societas christiana. In doing so, it can act in the public sphere as an authoritative voice that many listen to, even if the majority then decides according to their own conscience or individual ethical choices. At the same time, the political elite can govern a society that, from a religious point of view, is becoming increasingly pluralistic.

José Casanova’s approach, in turn, helps us understand how post-secularism does not mean the end of secularization processes. Just as the return of religions to the public arena does not necessarily mean a religious revival and a return to the beliefs and practices of the once dominant religion. Casanova’s insight is that, once we move beyond the ideological framework of secularization as a linear, irreversible process of religion’s exit from the theatre of modernity, religion can become a force for social and political change and the deprivatization of religion could transform into a search for new forms of belief, practicing and belonging, which do not necessarily end up restoring the remote glory of historic Churches and powerful faiths. In this sense, the post-secular is synonymous with the metamorphosis of the sacred and the affirmation of pluralism in the choices of believing and unbelieving (Stolz et al. 2015), which can also manifest themselves in mainstream Churches and long-standing religious traditions.

In Italy, post-secular refers to two processes. The first concerns social microphysics. I am referring to the set of attitudes and behaviors towards the religion of birth that cause it to lose followers, its churches to empty and it to withdraw from important sectors of society (economy, politics, education, science, art, and so on). People are more easily detached from their religion of birth and seek individualized and de-institutionalized forms of religious belief and practice. In Italy, more than three out of ten people now declare themselves to be non-religious but spiritual, i.e., no longer practicing Catholics or believers, but not indifferent or impervious to questions of meaning, which they seek in the vast and diverse market of salvation goods or simply by turning to other spiritual and philosophical traditions that do not seem so distant as to be incomprehensible. The best-known case is the relative success of Buddhism in Europe, including Italy (Obadia 2007; Zhe 2016; Obadia and Pace 2023).

The second process concerns the establishment of the modern state in Europe on the basis of the principle of systemic differentiation between politics and religion. The autonomy of the political sphere from the religious sphere is expressed in the secular form of the rule of law. To guarantee religious freedom and neutralize conflicts in the name of diversity of faiths, the state no longer defends this or that religion but merely sets general rules that make the exercise of freedom of worship possible. Post-secular, in this case, referring to the state means, in abstract terms, that after a phase (more or less long) in which it conformed to the secular model, it moves on to another in which the state shows an interest in recognizing the public role played by religions in society. On closer inspection, very few states in Europe have considered religion to be an exclusively private matter to be organized within society, but without any claim to recognition by the state itself. In most cases, we have had non-confessional states which, however, have established privileged (legally relevant) relations with a church representing the majority of the population or official state churches, which nevertheless respect the autonomy of the political sphere.

In the Italian case, this means a small cultural and political revolution: no longer considering Catholicism as the central axis of the religious system, around which small satellites revolve, minorities that gain recognition through a separate agreement with the state, but acknowledging that the religious field is now pluralistic and that the equality of all denominations before the state can no longer be regulated on the basis of political criteria that establish a hierarchy among different faiths. Only if treated equally can they contribute to rewriting the rules of free and peaceful coexistence, which would be seriously compromised if each defended the absolute reasons for its own faith in an intransigent manner, leading to forms of polarization, in some cases violent and dramatic.

8. Conclusions

I have tried to argue that Italy is a secularized society, in many ways post-Catholic, which nevertheless continues to consider Catholicism as a cultural horizon of common sense, a backstage of the collective memory (Davie 2000). Therefore, post-secular defines a sort of middle ground between a religiosity without a church and a secular state positively oriented towards the recognition of religion as a factor of social solidarity. I have again used the word secularization, no longer as a synonym for a linear process: more modernization, less religion. The meaning I have given to the term is different: it describes a process of socio-cultural change that is taking place in a specific society (Italy) and in a limited historical phase; the key feature of this change is the individualization of the choice to believe or not to believe, which prevails over believing by tradition and obedience to a religious system called the Catholic Church.

The departure from the religion of the church of birth (Catholicism, the historical and cultural framework of collective memory) frees, so to speak, the religious field from institutional constraints and controls. It becomes differentiated, open to the search for new spiritual paths, to forms of believing in the relative or not believing without social stigma of any kind. Furthermore, Italy has not known the model of a secular state, except for a brief period in its history (that of the first unified state born of the Risorgimento). The concordatory form of relations between the state and the Catholic Church is one of the few features of continuity between fascism and republican Italy, born of the Resistance, which the democratic Constitution of 1948 enshrines. The Concordat was only revised in 1984 (under a center-left government led by a socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi). Only then was the recognition of Catholicism as the state religion, which, as such, enjoyed a privileged position over other denominations and cults (then defined as minorities admitted on the basis of a specific agreement with the state), abolished. The long political hegemony exercised by the Catholic party, the Christian Democrats, did not lead to the establishment of a confessional state. There have always been different political views within that party, and no one has ever thought of betraying the idea of secularism enshrined in the Constitution, which was the result of an agreement between political forces of different cultural backgrounds and ideological inspirations (Catholics, Socialists, Communists, Liberals, Shareholders). Therefore, in the near future, Italy will be a country inhabited by citizens who profess a variety of religious faiths, including Catholicism, which will nevertheless continue to be the continuous bass accompanying the many variations on the theme of religion that Italy will experience.