In Italy, centuries-old churches dot the landscape, sanctuaries and processions draw crowds, and nearly 80% of the population profess themselves Catholic. But to the majority, it's an affiliation in name and tradition, with little adherence to doctrine or practice. Fewer than 20% attend services at least weekly, leaving a handful of elderly parishioners in church pews while young families gather at the next-door bars. Most say they're not hostile to religious practice — just indifferent. For many priests, that attitude means that a point of no return might have been reached in a society that a couple of generations ago still revolved around the church for much social activity.
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“‘I don’t have time, I don’t feel like it’ — there isn’t a real reason. That’s what’s scary,” said the Rev. Giovanni Mandozzi, parish priest in the sanctuary’s village, Isola. “I tell them, ‘I do Mass in under 40 minutes, you can leave your pasta sauce on the stove, and it won’t even stick to the bottom of the pot.’”
“It would have become just a routine,” said Agostino Tatulli, 24, a college and music conservatory student. “I’d say I’m spiritual. I don’t know if God exists.” “I’m a Catholic believer in the saints, not in the church,” he added before the celebrating priest — who also runs the sanctuary’s youth ministry — called out to Ferri and others to join him on a tractor ride.
“It’s taken for granted that you’re a believer, but you don’t participate. It’s not like I believed that much anyway,” she said in her hairdressing salon, next to a restaurant called “The Lost Sheep.” “Now I don’t even think about it.” Such believers should be focused on as if they were the last of the species on Noah’s Ark, joked the Rev. Bernardino Giordano, vicar general of the pontifical delegation to Loreto, another popular sanctuary.
Such an approach might appeal to Federica Nobile, 33, who defines herself as “Catholic but not too much.” Raised by a devout family, she sought to build some distance from their faith to exorcise “the absurd fear of hell” she grew up with.
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