Maurizio Pisati

Belonging without believing: Catholics in contemporary Italy

Abstract This article seeks to illustrate some characteristics of the religiosity of Italians, focusing on Catholicism and interpreting the data in the light of the model of religious economy. The issue of belonging to the Catholic Church is addressed first, with an emphasis on problems of measurement and on the factors which underlie the differentiation of religious orientations in Italy. Next, the practice of Catholicism, primarily attendance at Mass, is examined as an indicator of the diffusion and vitality of the Catholic Church, and its course since the Second World War is described. Finally, the article deals with the issue of belief, showing Italians’ widely diffused propensity to ‘deviate’ from full Catholic orthodoxy. Our analysis shows that while the Catholic Church has maintained its pre‐eminent position in Italys internal religious market, it has lost ground in recent decades and at present must contend with a considerable lack of both vitality and orthodoxy.

Dimmi in cosa credi e ti dirò chi sei : Un'analisi critica delle tipologie italiane di religiosità

In this article we carry out a critical analysis of eight typologies of individual religiousness elaborated in the last thirty years by several Italian sociologists. First, we analyze such typologies from a methodological point of view and show that (a) some of them fail to provide a firm theoretical basis for the choice of the empirical indicators used for the classification of individuals; and (b) all of them do not take properly into account either measurement error or sampling error or both. Next, we analyze the typologies from a theoretical point of view and show that all of them suffer from a crucial limitation: they focus on the Catholic church and, by so doing, interpret individual religiousness uniquely in terms of its degree of conformity with or deviance from the official model of religious practice and belief proposed by the Church of Rome. Finally, we argue that the adoption of the model of religious economy allows the researcher (a) to overcome the theoretical limitations of the existing typologies; and (b) to analyze individual religiousness in a more satisfactory way, namely one which takes into full account the choices of individuals