Introduction: The church and Catholicism in contemporary Italy

This special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies is devoted to the ‘Italian case’, and is marked by a two-fold intent: on the one hand, to create a greater in-depth understanding on an international scale of the Italian religious situation, whose specific characteristics and whose dynamism are often overlooked in pictures of ‘Roman’ Catholicism as a phenomenon that is fixed in time and dated, for the most part viewed as subordinate to a largely conservative and traditionalistic Vatican; on the other hand, to provide the reader with an opportunity to compare events in the realm of Italian religion with what is happening in other western nations, in order to identify both uniform trends and distinctive traits, with reference to diverse cultural and historic conditions and contexts.