The ‘sectarian’ Church. Catholicism in Italy since John Paul II

Abstract

Many surveys report that the rate of church attendance in Italy is still very high, one of the highest in Europe. Are these data reliable? Is there really a ‘Catholic effect’ in Italy, a persistent popular affection for the Catholic Church, a slower rate of secularization? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to these questions but there are many elements that would contradict the optimistic (for the Catholic Church) view: 1) different (and more pessimistic) data on church attendance; 2) the decreasing number of priests and their ageing; and 3) disaffection among the younger generation. A good part of the Catholic hierarchy, and the two last popes, firmly believe that the rise of new movements (Comunione and Liberazione, Neocatecumenals, Charismatic Renewals and others) may correct the secularization trend and the demise of traditional territorial parishes. But encouraging these movements requires promoting a fundamental change in the cultural and organizational form of Catholicism towards a sort of never-seen ‘sectarian Church’.

In American sociological literature, the ‘Catholic effect’ refers to findings from national and cross-national surveys indicating that, ceteris paribus, national or local Catholic monopolies showed more religious vitality than other monopolies, especially Protestant ones. (Diotallevi, 2002)

Does an Italian ‘Catholic effect’ indeed exist? Is it really true that the Italian Catholic Church has greater resilience than other religious institutions, and that, for this reason, the pace of secularization is slower in Italy than in the other large countries of Western Europe, such as Great Britain or France? And again, is it really true that this resilience in Italy is displayed by institutional Catholicism, i.e. that of local parishes – what Max Weber (1978, 1993) and Ernest Troeltsch (1992) would have called ‘Church Christianity’?

Answering these questions requires a rapid examination of some indicators of the religiosity of Italians, followed by a discussion of the main choices made by the Catholic leadership, and the profound structural and cultural changes that have taken place in the decades since the Second Vatican Council.

Italians and the Catholic religion

In 2009, Paolo Segatti and Lucio Brunelli asked a representative sample of the Italian population how frequently they attended Sunday mass: 27.7% replied that they attended every Sunday, 16.1% two or three times a month, 13.7% once a month, 23.4% two or three times a year; and 18.3% declared that they never did so (Segatti and Brunelli, 2010). Similarly, one of the most attentive and scrupulous observers of Italian Catholicism, Franco Garelli, cited the data collected by a large-scale sociological survey (Garelli, 2011) as showing that 26.5% of Italians attended religious services at least once a week, while 15.8% do so once a month (and 35.9% on some occasions during the year, presumably at Christmas and Easter). These data indicate that around one Italian in two attends Sunday service at least once a month. In the light of these findings, Garelli (2006) states that

if these data are compared with those of other European countries, one gains an idea of the particular nature of the Italian case, which is distinguished by a minority of ‘faithful’ or assiduous attendees at religious services which is much larger than in other European countries. In France, for instance, … no more than 12% of the population attends religious services at least once a month. (Garelli, 2006: 121)

The high overall level of religious practice in Italy, Garelli concludes, ‘is part of a picture of widespread religiosity in which the great majority of people recognize – at least ideally – the importance of faith, accept Christian values, and declare their adherence to Catholicism.’

I must confess that I find these data (and interpretations) counter-intuitive. I also find them surprising because they are greatly at odds with my own experience, with common sense, and probably also with the perceptions of the majority of Italians and with the perceptions of ‘religious practitioners’ – that is, priests and Catholic activists (Marzano, 2012).

I have no doubt concerning the seriousness of the colleagues who collected these data (which have by now been made ‘official’ by authoritative statistical institutes like the ISTAT (National Institute of Statistics) and by majority public opinion). But I have genuine misgivings about the reliability of the instrument – a sample survey – used to measure attendance at religious services. My misgivings have been increased by a provocative article which appeared some years ago in the journal Polis. Written by Castegnaro and Dalla Zuanna (2006), the article was entitled ‘Studiare la pratica religiosa: differenze tra rilevazione diretta e dichiarazioni degli intervistati sulla frequenza alla messa’ (‘Studying religious practice: Differences between direct survey results and interviewee declarations concerning attendance’). The authors, following two important articles published in the American Sociological Review during the 1990s (Hadaway et al., 1993, 1998), began by arguing that inspection of the large body of data available on religiosity and the relationship of the individual with the transcendent shows that data on religious practice and attendance are among the most ‘objective’ (in that they refer to a specific behaviour, not a value orientation) and most significant (being almost everywhere considered ‘strong’ indicators of the bond between the population and the Church). What should be tested, according to Castegnaro and Dalla Zuanna, was the reliability of the surveys on the topic – on which doubt is cast by downward estimates by numerous priests. They therefore decided to precede – on a ‘normal’ Sunday (i.e. without particular tourist outflows) in the autumn of 2004 – a traditional sample survey with an accurate count of the mass attendance covering all the places of Catholic worship in the Patriarchate of Venice. The result was astonishing: only 15% of the population of the Patriarchate had actually gone to church on that Sunday, compared with 26% of the subjects in the sample who declared, some months later, that they never missed Sunday mass. Also of great interest are data relating to the municipality of Venice. According to a survey conducted in 1999 by the International Society for the Sociology of Religion, 33% of Venice residents regularly attended mass; according to the 2005 Castegnaro-Dalla Zuanna survey, assiduous attendees amounted to 26.4%, but according to the ‘real’ calculation they constituted only 11% of the Venetian population. There were interesting differences among age groups, too: the percentage among over-60s rose to 19.6, but among people aged between 18 and 25, it fell to 5.1. This means that in the municipality of Venice no more than 1 young person in 20 ‘really’ goes to church every Sunday. Another survey, conducted in 2002 in the diocese of Belluno-Feltre reported similar results (Castegnaro, 2009b), and a more recent study by Castegnaro (2009a) has shown an 11-point difference between estimates by priests and self-declarations, obviously to the advantage of the latter. This is a finding entirely in line with those reported by Hadaway and colleagues (1993, 1998) for the United States. If projected at national level, it reduces the percentage of ‘real’ church attendances to no more than half of those ‘declared’ in surveys.

‘If the discrepancy between declared and actual attendance is as large in Italy as in the United States, the reassuring – for religious practitioners – view of the resilience of Italian Catholicism should be reconsidered’, wrote Castegnaro and Dalla Zuanna (2006: 88). It is difficult to argue otherwise.

A more recent replication of Castegnaro’s work in the Diocese of Piazza Armerina in Sicily (incidentally, one of the less secular areas of the country) showed that no more than 18 per cent of the population aged over ten years regularly attended Sunday mass in that area (Introvigne and Zoccatelli, 2009).

Of course, the number of churchgoers is not the only ‘hard’ measure of secularization. Another interesting indicator of the relationship between Italians and the Catholic Church is the trend in religious weddings. In Italy, the total number of weddings has decreased (with a concomitant increase in cohabitations) by around 50%, falling from 419,000 in 1972 to 204,830 in 2011. There has been a large increase (especially in the urban centres of central-northern Italy) in the percentage of civil marriages, which rose from 20.3% to 39.2% in the 15 years between 1996 and 2011. Again, according to ISTAT data for 2011, in all the regions north of Umbria, civil marriages recorded percentages above 50%. Between 1991 and 2011, religious marriages decreased by 52% from 257,555 to 124,443 (to be noted is that, as confirmed by my observation of the premarital courses which I have been conducting in recent years, the large majority of these couples are non-churchgoers who will sever every relationship with the Church after celebration of their marriage).

The decline in the number of religious marriages evidences the many difficulties encountered by the Catholic Church in reaching the younger generation. These difficulties have been widely confirmed by recent surveys, which demonstrate the growing detachment of the younger generation from the Church.

If one compares, as Castegnaro (2012) did, the attitudes of young people (aged 18–26) with those of their parents (48–56), one discovers that all the indicators of religiousness and membership of the Church have halved in the space of a single generation: belief in God, the conviction that the Eucharist is the flesh and blood of Jesus, consideration of the parish as spiritually uplifting, and interest in religious ceremonies. As age decreases, so it is matched by an increase in the number of people who feel the Church to be ‘distant’, ‘severe’, ‘a source of distress’. The percentage of young people who believe that the pope and the bishops can define what is evil diminishes to 15% (from the 35% of their parents).

The authors of another large-scale survey, Segatti and Brunelli (2010), write that

the data evidence a striking generational divide. The greatest differences are between young people born after 1981 and people born before 1945. … It truly seems as if one is observing another world … They go decidedly less often to church; they believe less in God; they pray less; they have less trust in the Church; they define themselves less as Catholics; and they do not believe that being Italian equates with being Catholic. (Segatti and Brunelli, 2010: 351)

Also the traditional gender gap has substantially decreased among young people. Girls now tend to behave like their male counterparts: that is, detach themselves from the Church. In the most recent generation, observant Catholics are destined to become an extreme minority – the believing minority.

A third indicator of the strength of secularization is ecclesiastical personnel: priests and monks (members of religious orders). A healthy Church would produce numerous vocations, while a Church without priests is inevitably an organization that is different (in structure, in culture, in its relationships with believers and the population, and in many other respects) from the one that Europe has known for centuries. Once again, little comment is necessary because the data speak for themselves. The crisis of the clergy is of striking proportions in Italy (the data that I cite below are drawn from Molina and Diotallevi, 2005). In 2003, the average age of diocesan priests was 60 (with 33 years as average tenure). Half of those ordained before 1967 and more than 10% of the total were more than 80 years old. Some 40% of those who leave the priesthood (because of death, invalidity, retirement or abandonment) are not replaced. In the regions of Marche and Piemonte, exits are respectively four and three times higher than entries. One-third of the clergy serve in only two large pastoral regions: Lombardia and Triveneto. At the beginning of the 20th century, the density of priests in comparison with the Italian population was 2 per thousand. There were almost 69,000 priests for 33 million inhabitants. By 1951 the priesthood had diminished by 30% while there had been a substantial increase in the population: there were 47,000 priests for 47 million inhabitants (the density having decreased to 1 per thousand). Today in Italy (2009 data), there are just under 30,000 secular priests among 59 million inhabitants (an average density of 1 per 2 thousand). They are fewer in number than dentists, psychologists and accountants. And there has been an inexorable increase in priests born abroad (especially in poor countries), who now account for 5% of the total, and for 18% of ordinations in 2003. In some regions (Umbria, Toscana and Abruzzo-Molise), their percentage is well above 30%. And the situation is bound to worsen in the future. According to projections by Molina and Diotallevi (2005), at a constant rate of ordinations, the 33,000 priests of 2003 will become 25,400 in 2023, with a 23% decrease in only 20 years. Already today, in five pastoral regions (Liguria, Emilia-Romagna, Toscana, Umbria and Abruzzo-Molise), the threshold of one diocesan (regular) priest per parish is not reached. In 2023 there will be fully nine pastoral regions with a coverage of less than 1 priest per parish. Also the quality of training is deteriorating owing to scant or non-existent investment. There will also be significant changes in career paths: ordinands will immediately become parish priests, thus losing much of their motivation to do good deeds.

The serving clergy seems to be in great difficulties, forced into a clandestine or solitary affective life (as a consequence of the mandatory celibacy), overloaded with functions. The clergy is poorly paid, ignored by superiors, unable to engage in authentic evangelization, forced to defend the manoeuvres of the Church authorities in morals and ethics, and tempted by the mortal embrace of the ‘new Catholic movements’ offering communitarian comfort but at the price of autonomy, freedom and the substantial debasement of their function (Marzano, 2012).

The sectarian Church

The data that I have presented seemingly testify that Italian Catholicism is in much less robust health than numerous surveys indicate. If my interpretation is correct, the rate of Italian secularization (or at least, the crisis of institutional ‘church’ Catholicism) is similar to the rate recorded in other countries – for example in France, as amply described by Daniel Hervieu-Léger (2001, 2003).

I believe that the Catholic authorities are well aware of this state of affairs. It is difficult to imagine that they do not receive complaints and appeals for help from the many priests and laypeople still committed to the Church in the periphery. And I believe that the ecclesiastical ruling class is sincerely and profoundly concerned about the fates of parishes, the clergy, the religious orders and the laity. After all, the Church hierarchy is also made up of priests, many of whom, at least at the beginning of their careers, were responsible for parishes as simple presbyters. Hence, among the ranks of the Church there is a shared ‘identity’ that should enable the authorities to understand the suffering of the rank and file; and, one would hope, come to their aid. The fact is, however, that the heads of the Catholic Church have absolutely no idea how to remedy the emptying of the churches and the thinning of the priestly ranks.

The only organizational reforms attempted in recent years (principally the creation of the ‘pastoral unit’, an organizational entity comprising a group of priests invited to cohabit and to manage several parishes jointly) are essentially bureaucratic solutions, or at any rate far too timid to achieve any radical reverse in current trends. There are therefore many good reasons for believing (in the absence of official admissions, which will never be made) that the Church authorities now consider the crisis irremediable and can only hope that it will not degenerate further (as in fact seems likely considering the ongoing secularization of the younger generation).

Without any serious attempt to halt the decline of clergy and parishes, the Catholic elite has more or less deliberately devised a two-pronged reaction strategy: unbridled interventionism together with authoritarian and media-driven papism on the one hand, and ‘sectarian’ proliferation on the other (where the term is used in a rigorously technical and Weberian sense).

With the first prong of its strategy, the Catholic elite has occupied the media centre stage. An exceptionally ‘communicative’ and charismatic pope like John Paul II reaffirmed – indeed exacerbated with a media over-exposure that lasted until the last instant of his earthly existence – the monarchical nature of the Roman papacy. Thus definitively shelved was the intention developed at the time of the Second Vatican Council to attenuate the centralist character of the Church’s command structure. This was achieved, for instance, by denying the importance of the traditions and opinions of local churches in the appointment of the bishops or by ‘commissariating’ the religious orders: consider the appointment of the successor to Father Arrupe at the head of the Society of Jesus, suspected of disobedience toward the Holy See. The media prominence of the pope and the role of the episcopate (above all of its undisputed leader for 20 years, Camillo Ruini) has certainly been facilitated, at least in Italy, by the demise of authentic competing elites, following the decline or disappearance of the great mass political parties and their associated political ideologies (or secular religions). If one also considers the Church’s capacity to organize successful large-scale events like Family Day, one understands how its leaders have been able to acquire a public role with a salience unprecedented in recent decades.

From this point of view, the fall in the early 1990s of Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, the Catholic party which governed the country uninterruptedly for 50 years after the end of the Second World War) indubitably provided the Church hierarchy with the opportunity to pursue its new strategy of ‘presence’. In fact, the long period of government by Christian Democracy (which soon became relatively independent of the Vatican’s dictates) did not prevent the advance of secularization. It forced the Church to defend (or not to censure) moral and cultural behaviour by Christian Democratic leaders which was at least questionable from a Catholic perspective. Above all it obliged the hierarchy to refrain from any direct intervention in public affairs, for fear of being accused of undue interference and thereby damaging Christian Democracy. For these reasons, the end of a Catholic front united within a single political party gave the Church extraordinary freedom of movement in the public arena. There ensued a cascade (facilitated by comparison with the utter cultural mediocrity of the political class) of interventions concerning all the issues on the cultural and political agenda, and particularly ethical questions such as the beginning and end of life, assisted reproduction, and euthanasia. But this frenetic activism does not seem to have reversed secularization in the slightest. Instead, it has created the (false) image of the Church’s excessive power, of an extraordinary ‘awakening of the sacred’, of religion’s resurgence in the public sphere. I would describe this as a ‘media effect’ more than as a ‘Catholic effect’.

The second part of the strategy, which was indirectly set in motion by the Second Vatican Council but then concretely encouraged by John Paul II, Benedict XVI and a large part of the Catholic leadership, has been more ‘structural’ than the first part, and it has had such an impact that it requires careful sociological analysis. It has consisted in the Church’s enormous opening of credit with the new Catholic movements, for which John Paul II’s great sympathy is well known. Cardinal Ruini maintained that the Church’s hope for the future resides in those movements, and he recalled the great support first given to them by Wojtyla:

John Paul II immediately understood, long before many others, even bishops, that these movements, these new organizations, despite their difficulties and their defects, are highly beneficial to the Church. He therefore valued them, and he loved them, so that they felt understood and encouraged. He assembled them to celebrate Pentecost in 1998 and invited them to begin a new phase of greater maturity. Ten years later, we may say that this proposal by the Pope has been substantially accepted. I would add that John Paul II understood their historical function, which has to less to do with politics and more with the Church and evangelization. In his turn, Benedict XVI, who was then Cardinal Ratzinger, in the same year of 1998 expounded in theological terms the reasons for John Paul II’s position, interpreting the current phenomenon of the new Catholic movements as in a certain sense analogous to previous ones in the history of the Church: one thinks of monasticism, the Franciscan movement, or the Jesuits in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Galli della Loggia and Ruini, 2009: 72–73)

And in effect John Paul II supported, encouraged and protected the lay movements within the Church. He considered them to be Christianity’s vital energy in the age of secularization, essential bulwarks against the rampant de-Christianization of Europe, and forces complementary and subordinate to his personal charisma as the ‘universal shepherd’ and the tireless ‘pilgrim of Christ’ (Miccoli, 2007). The movements amply reciprocated the Pope’s favour. They filled city squares with their rallies, preached absolute faith in the Polish pope, and supported with loyalty and conviction (unlike the parishes, which were rather ‘cold’ in this regard) the political, social and cultural campaigns announced by Rome. In all these campaigns – from those, by now decades-long, against divorce and abortion to the more recent ones against euthanasia, assisted fertilization and civil partnerships – the movements invariably showed total alignment with Vatican policies.

For John Paul II, the growth of the lay movements was the outstanding fruit of the conciliar period, because it represented a formidable reason for mobilization by all Catholics, a unique occasion to reaffirm the central importance of Christianity’s original message, and to show its perfect capacity to address the problems of contemporaneity. The birth of the movements had been, for Karol Wojtyla, the result of a vital thrust, of a yearning to rediscover the profoundest reasons for faith, finally cleansed of the patina which so many – too many – subtle theological distinctions had deposited during the years since the Second Vatican Council. In Wojtyla’s words, the flourishing of the new Catholic movements was ‘the response evoked by the Holy Spirit to the dramatic challenges of the end of the millennium’, a locus in which to find again ‘the authentic sense of a profoundly experienced personal faith and the meaning of unshakable fidelity to the magisterium of the Church’ (Miccoli, 2007: 161).

This vision has been largely shared by John Paul’s successor. The future Benedict XVI, speaking as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to its World Congress of the Ecclesial Movements in 1998, described as a ‘wonderful event’ his first meeting with ‘movements such the Neocatecumenates, Communion and Liberation, and the Focolare movement, when he experienced the energy and enthusiasm with which they lived the faith’ (Miccoli, 2007: 21).

Ratzinger began by drawing a sharp distinction between the enthusiastic outpouring of faith by the ecclesial movements and the coldness of theologians and the bureaucratic immobilism of many ecclesiastical institutions. For Ratzinger (2007: 72), besides the huge commitment of so many laypeople, there were numerous priestly vocations and new ‘branches of the consecrated life’ flourishing within the movements, able to counter the priesthood’s general decline in many parts of the Catholic world. The movements were the most authentic demonstration of ‘charisma’ within the Church. They were the contemporary equivalents of the ancient orders, of mediaeval monasticism, of the Franciscan challenge, namely of those components of Catholicism which, though not complying with the local principle of subordination to the parish priest, remained within the bounds of Catholicism and paid allegiance to the bishops.

The energy unleashed by the movements should, Benedict XVI argued, be kept under control (above all by the bishops) and integrated into the life of the Church. It should not be repressed and punished, lest there arise distressing and painful conflicts and schisms like those of the Protestant Reformation, the Hussites, the Waldenses and many others in the past. On the contrary, the pressure applied by the movements must be interpreted as a sign of the action of the Holy Spirit, as an irreplaceable fuel driving the vital impulse and charismatic energy of the Church and renewed adherence to the original reasons for faith in the Church. Harnessing this force would enable Catholicism more effectively to counter both secularization and the Pentecostal movement by offering the inhabitants of the ‘society of uncertainty’ (Bauman, 2007) a familiar place, a home ‘in which to experience fellowship in communion with Christ’ (Ratzinger, 2007: 90); a place, as described by the future pope, perhaps more pleasant and ‘warmer’ than that offered by parishes and traditional religious associations. The suffering and the frictions that the irruption of the new movements had caused in numerous areas of the Church had been predictable, said Ratzinger, and, with the requisite theological adjustments, they were due to a normal tension between charismatic enthusiasm and the institutional order. The latter is essential to guarantee the Church’s continuity and stability. But the former, in the historical-theological reconstruction proposed by Ratzinger, is the cornerstone of the Christian edifice – the one founded on the Gospel preached after Pentecost by the apostles, who acted without rigid boundaries because they considered the whole world to be their territory of evangelization. In this they were closer to the activists of the new Catholic movements (and for that matter to the pontiff) than to the bishops and the priests.

Monasticism, like the contemporary movements, has always had a marked tendency to ‘go into the desert’, to separate itself from the rigid structure of the local church, and to reject the many compromises that the institutional Church has been forced to reach with earthly life. It tries to enter into a more integral and less spurious Christian life-course, not attentive to the structures of the local church and yet not coinciding with them, nor exhausting them but rather furnishing, through the energies of faith that it is able to produce and for the personnel allocated to it, spiritual strength and charisma (Ratzinger 2007: 32). The popes did not create medieval missionary monasticism, Ratzinger continues, but they supported it by virtue of that universal spiritual impulse which released them from bonds with a specific territory, strengthening in them a distinctive apostolic vocation which consolidated the institution without preventing change.

It was John Paul II who had recognized the movements as valuable allies in affirming the restorative design of his pontificate: at the summit a revered and omnipotent pope, already suffused with holiness in his own lifetime; in civil society an archipelago of movements characterized by different spiritualities but all devoted to him in person and in faith. ‘It is no chance’, Ratzinger (2007: 44) argued in his celebrated address already cited, ‘that a Papacy and movements extending beyond the scope and the structure of the local church always go hand in hand’. In between lies a set of intermediary bodies, principally the parishes, stunted and reduced to being faithful transmission belts for Vatican instructions.

Movements and institution

The Church’s policy of openness to the movements has borne exceptional fruit (Pace, 2003). Positively influenced by the historical robustness of Catholic associationism, and probably also by the disappearance of potential competitors in the ‘market’ of political-social militancy, the growth of the ecclesial movements in recent decades has been impressive. Many of the most important experiences in the Catholic world were born in Italy: the Focolarini movement was founded by an Italian woman, Chiara Lubitch; Don Giussani, the creator of Comunione e Liberazione, was a Milanese priest, a teacher of religion first in a high school and then at the Università Cattolica; and Kiko Arguello, the founder of the Cammino Neocatecumenale (40,000 communities around the world, including 10,000 in Italy with around 300,000 members) is Spanish but has lived for years in Italy, where the movement has its largest number of adherents. Except for Rinnovamento Carismatico (Charismatic Renewal) and Opus Dei, all the great Catholic movements are Italian ‘products’: they were born or made their fortunes in Italy.

The movements give a Church in difficulties numerous strings to its bow: for instance, they are instruments for the recruitment and conversion of the ‘distant ones’ (a task which the clergy, depleted in its ranks and overburdened with pastoral and administrative work, is no longer able to perform); and they welcome numerous believers marginalized by the Church and excluded from the sacraments (especially the divorced and separated). They have proved to be important means for the mobilization of young people and of families, to which they offer the comfort and enthusiasm of community life. They have likewise proved able not only to generate vocations for the priesthood and open their own seminaries but also to assign a leading and autonomous role to the Catholic laity, thereby compensating for the chronic crisis of the clergy. Furthermore, the movements represent (paradoxically, in that they advocate a purificatory return to the origins of the Christian creed, to the pentecost and the catechumenate) a response to the crisis of the ‘religious tradition’, a sort of Americanization and ‘sectarian Protestantization’ of Roman Catholicism, the most extreme form of Catholicism’s adaptation to ‘late modern’ or ‘post-modern’ community life: the space, that is, once occupied by the great projects of social, civil, religious and political transformation but today dominated by individuals with their biographies, and their personal and tenaciously this-worldly needs for certainty and redemption; in short, by their sacred selves (Csordas, 1997). I have attended some meetings of the Japanese Buddhist group Sokka Gakkai (now expanding rapidly in Italy), where I gained the impression that it bore close structural similarities, aside from differences in cultural background, to Rinnovamento dello Spirito or the Neocatecumenali: absolute declericalization and rejection of institutional mediation; a sectarian vocation and explicit renunciation of every project for social change; a focus on the ‘here and now’ and annulment of every eschatological horizon; autonomous hermeneutics of the sacred texts and self-produced ‘popular’ theology; and high emotional intensity and the communitarian sharing of existential experiences collectively interpreted in light of the group’s ‘credo’.

The new Catholic movements have a simple, in some cases elementary, religiosity administered by a class of non-professional managers lacking any specific theological training. Theirs is a spiritual life marked by new rituals entirely autonomous from those of the Christian calendar: the initial catecheses of the Neochatecumenal Way, intended to recruit new followers and form new communities, follow an identical pattern (rigorously laid down by the founder), and they are performed on the same days and at the same time (Mondays and Thursdays at 9 p.m.) in every part of the country; attendees at the Comunione e Liberazione ‘community schools’ throughout the world simultaneously read (on the same days) passages from the works of Giussani selected by the group’s leaders; the Charismatics ‘re-baptize’ their new adherents with a distinctive ritual.; and so on. Sometimes, and always in the case of the Catechumenals, the innovations also concern liturgical and sacramental aspects, celebration of the Eucharist, and confession, which from a solitary and private act of penitence becomes a public and communitarian one.

This variegated sectarian archipelago cannot peacefully co-exist with the parishes, the clergy and institutional Catholicism. And, in fact, in contemporary Catholicism they live side by side, ‘separated under one roof’, often wrangling or in open conflict, but more often ignoring each other. The reasons for the divisions are those (well known and on which it is therefore not necessary to dwell) expounded by Weber (1978, 1993) and Troelstch (1992) when describing the Church/Sect dichotomy: a Church is an open institution, inclusive, sacramental and ‘normalizing’, while a Sect is the expression of authentic charisma and disdainfully rejects the institutional one of the Church. In some cases, the antagonism is also expressly theorized: for the Neochatecumenals, the Catholicism of the parishes is a ‘Catholicism of conservation’, good for little old ladies and for those (increasingly few) who already have a solid faith. For them, the Edict of Constantine was a betrayal of Christ and transformed Catholicism into a ‘state Church’. It inaugurated a ‘history of error’ (statements made at a Neochatecumenal meeting) which lasted until the Second Vatican Council and the return of the proto-Christian catechumenate. It is not even necessary to be a baptized Catholic to enter a catechumenal community. All that is required is acceptance of the community’s rules.

From this point of view, the reassuring comparison, very popular in the Italian sociological debate and in Benedict XVI’s discourses, between the new ecclesial movements and the ancient monastic orders is in many respects inadequate. For monasticism has always been a Christian way of life relatively separate from the ‘world’ and reserved for the ‘special’ faithful who have decided to consecrate their lives to Christ and the Church. For the diocesan clergy, this confers a privileged status, and it requires specific theological and pastoral training managed by the institution. In contrast, the members of the movements are the ordinary lay faithful who, instead of paying obedience to their priest and participating in normal sacramental life, choose a separate itinerary of faith (with its array of doctrines, symbols and rituals) in many respects completely autonomous from that proposed by the Church.

I therefore believe that analogies with the past have little value in this case, and that it is necessary to find new concepts with which to describe the current situation of Catholicism (at least in Italy).

Conclusion

I have entitled this paper ‘The sectarian Church’ because it seems to me that this definition grasps the central feature of the present situation of Italian Catholicism: that of a long-term, strategic alliance between a Church leadership which has lost hope in reversing the progress of secularization, and at the same time is able as never before to disguise this fact and to massively occupy the media centre stage, and a heterogeneous galaxy of spiritual movements expressing modern ‘sectarian individualism’, forms of religiosity and communitarian life perhaps more proper to post-Christian society than to parishes and oratories. The division of roles within this ‘strange alliance’ seems to me very clear. The Church hierarchy arrogates to itself hegemonic control over the public and media space reserved for Catholicism, in return offering to the movements the reassuring certainty of absolute intolerance, of an eternal NO, in every area of ecclesial life (celibacy, female priesthood, etc.) and bioethical debate (contraceptive methods, surrogate fertilization, living wills, etc.). The movements, for their part, are wholly committed to strengthening the silent expansion of their communities, to occupying the parishes, and to forming their own clergy. They are entirely uninterested in occupying the public and political stage; a task which they gladly delegate to a Roman leadership which pursues so well, with unassailable theological arguments, an integralist and radically conservative line which they find perfectly congenial. When necessary, the two worlds (that of the Church hierarchy and that of the movements) meet in the city squares, to exploit the opportunity to offer the image of their strength to Italian society, of the extraordinary solidity of this hybrid creature, the sectarian Church, to which it seems that the future of Catholicism belongs.