Leaving Religion in Italy

Italy is a Catholic country in the same way New England is Puritan — the institution is cultural inheritance more than living practice for a large slice of the population. Sunday Mass attendance has fallen below 20%, weekly attendance among under-30s is in the single digits in most major cities, and yet baptism rates remain very high, first communion is universal, weddings are still mostly church weddings, and funerals are unimaginable as anything else. The country has a hundred million unfilled seats every Sunday and a hundred million filled seats at Christmas.

The Italian exit is therefore mostly about untangling the cultural and family rituals from the doctrinal claims you no longer hold. You are not really leaving practice — you may have stopped practicing years ago — you are figuring out what to do about your mother’s expectation that your child will be baptized, and what to do at your grandfather’s funeral, and how to attend your cousin’s wedding. The pillar pages on Catholicism and on funerals and weddings will fit most of you better than the pages on active doctrinal exits.

The harder exits in Italy are concentrated in two communities: the small but committed Italian Pentecostal and evangelical churches (especially in the south and Sicily), and the Italian Jehovah’s Witness population, which is one of the largest in continental Europe. Those exits look more like other Pentecostal and JW exits worldwide than like the Italian Catholic fade.