Spirituality and Catholicism: the Italian Experience

At the start of the twenty-first century Catholicism is still the prevailing belief system of most Italians, but a recent project on Italian religion and spirituality, carried out in 2006, has found that Italians are now more interested in spirituality, that they might describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and that they privilege the ‘God within’ rather than the transcendent God of traditional Catholic belief. This article presents the findings of The Italian Religion and Spirituality Project and focuses on what Italians mean by a ‘spiritual life’. After an overview of the growing interest in spirituality in the Italian socio-cultural setting, various aspects are illustrated: Italians’ self-assessment of religiosity and spirituality; meanings of spirituality; involvement in church and/or in holistic activities; various attitudinal variables, such as preference, beliefs, identification, and willingness to lead a religious and/or a spiritual life. A typology is then elaborated to study the profiles of four groups: (1) neither religious nor spiritual; (2) religious, but not spiritual; (3) spiritual, but not religious; (4) both spiritual and religious. Two key concepts, intra-religious spirituality and extra-religious spirituality, are introduced to examine some of the ways in which spirituality finds expression in the context of contemporary Catholicism. After describing the different ways Italians understand the term ‘spirituality’, I identify three profiles of spirituality: ‘ethic’, ‘religious’, and ‘inner-self’. Finally, the significance of the ‘God within’ is discussed, a phenomenon that is perhaps more readily associated with Protestant forms of holistic spiritualities, but is surprisingly also significant within Italian Catholicism.