Although the title of ‘eldest daughter of the Church’ belongs to France, the beautiful land of Italy has always had a privileged relationship with the Catholic Church. It has produced more than 200 popes, and Rome’s central position on the peninsula and in the Catholic world has ensured that it has played a leading role for centuries. For the Italians, this supposedly universal Catholic Church was above all ‘their’ Church. But this privilege is being eroded, and the decline in practice, observed throughout the old world, is happening in places where it was least expected. Could it be that Italian churches are also being emptied?
Professor Luca Diotallevi of the University of Rome has just published a book entitled La messa è sbiadita. La partecipazione ai riti religiosi in Italia dal 1993 al 2019, which examines the collapse of Sunday Mass attendance in his country over the last twenty-five years. The findings are stark: the ‘Italian privilege’ will soon be a thing of the past.
Diotallevi’s study is based on figures from ISTAT, the Italian national statistics institute. He distinguishes between the identification criterion and the participation criterion. The identification criterion, which in Italy is measured, for example, by the tax return, which includes a reference to membership of the Catholic Church, is holding up slightly better than participation. Mass attendance is one of the most universal and recognised criteria for measuring the participation in and intensity of Catholic religious practice. The other criterion, reception of the sacraments—mainly baptism and marriage, and the Eucharist to a lesser extent—retains a strong sociological or customary aspect, which provides only partial information about the recipients’ relationship with the Catholic faith. As for individual prayer, this is a form of piety that is not specific to Catholicism.
Professor Diotallevi observed that Mass attendance in Italy was in freefall throughout the period studied, with accelerating effects: a more marked decline from 2005 onwards and a further fall in 2020 and 2021, corresponding with the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. A pivotal date is 2017—the year in which the number of people who say they “never” attend Mass exceeds the number who say they attend “at least once a week.”
In figures, we go from 37.3% of the population attending Sunday Mass in 1993 to 23.7% in 2019—bearing in mind that declared attendance is always higher than actual attendance, which means that the actual figures are even lower. These are global figures—regardless of gender or age. The researcher also observes other new trends: for example, the growing disaffection of women for Mass, when traditionally, and particularly in Italy, they were seen as ‘pillars of the parish.’ Another worrying phenomenon is that older people, who were once known to return to the faith with age after a period away from the practice, are less and less returning to church. As a result, Sunday gatherings, hitherto dominated by women and the elderly, will soon be disappearing.
Professor Diotallevi’s diagnosis is therefore very gloomy: soon, in Italy, attendance at Sunday Mass “will be reduced to a figure approaching 10% of the population, which in many parts of the country corresponds to an actual figure in the single digits.”
Why such a collapse, in a country that for a long time seemed unaffected by the general trend towards secularisation? What traveller has never pushed open the door of an Italian church, cool and dark, and been able to note with tender emotion that even in the most remote little village, the rosary was recited there, and the reassuring light of the candles flickered constantly in front of the portrait of a Baroque Madonna?
Professor Diotallevi puts forward one hypothesis: a profound change in the rites offered to the faithful. He points the finger at a responsibility that came partly from above. He writes that “this phenomenon may have been accelerated by the staging of Vatican liturgies that we have witnessed over the last three pontificates”: a media-orchestrated demonstration of faith, devaluing the centuries-old, intimate practice within the parish church. There has also been “significant deregulation of increasingly large sections of the liturgical offering,” with the result that the faithful no longer recognise themselves in constantly changing and reinterpreted liturgical forms. The adaptation of the liturgical offering during the COVID-19 pandemic, put into practice by some priests, amplified the phenomenon. Filmed catecheses, online Masses, the disappearance of physical sacraments: why go to Mass at all?
In Italy, as elsewhere, the clergy have certainly observed the phenomenon and tried to come up with alternative solutions, often pompously grouped together under the catch-all term of ‘new evangelisation,’ with a surfeit of ancillary and parallel activities that, far from bringing the faithful back to Sunday Mass, have tended to drive them away: youth gatherings, collective prayers, charitable commitments in the broadest sense of the term. Professor Diotavelli is outspoken in his condemnation of the damage done: “a loosening of ecclesial-type community ties, to the benefit of a congregationalist drift and a democratisation of religion,” with sometimes fierce competition between movements. In his view, there is a continuum linking the pontificates of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis: none of the three has been able to really halt the general downward trend.
The aim of the Roman academic’s book is not to draw up a precise, well-argued indictment of all those responsible. He observes and analyses the facts, and questions the possible causes, but he notes that the dynamic is extremely negative, and that it is the result of deliberate choices and encouragement of harmful trends. These have favoured mass effects to the detriment of simplicity and proximity. It will be difficult to rebuild the links that have been severed.
Is it too late? Only God knows. But how painful it is to imagine that, in a few years’ time, pilgrims wandering the roads of Puglia or Umbria will find deserted churches, where the Madonna and the saints, abandoned in the dark for lack of flickering candles, will have no faithful to show their tears of water and blood to?
