A very interesting question there, Twila.
A friend of mine was complaining about her Italian relatives not wanting to attend mass when they came to visit
her in the U.S. Made the comment about how Italian nationals are not as reglious as Italian Americans.
In theory 87.8% of Italians identify themselves as Roman Catholics however only 36.8% considered themselves
practising Catholics and only 30.8% said they attended church every Sunday.
(A proposito, I love it when Catholics ask me if I'm Christian or Catholic. Anyone who
follows Christ is a Christian which of course includes Catholics. The correct question
would be are you Protestant or Catholic.)
While Catholicism is by far the strongest Christian denomination in Italy, and the country has more cardinals than
any other country in the world, it is also home to a significant minority of other Christian denominations. The oldest
of the non-Catholic entities, the Waldensian Evangelical Church, forms a single church with Methodists and is a pre-Lutheran
Protestant community (which then adopted Calvinist theology, so that it can be considered the
Italian branch of Reformed churches), based in some valleys of Piedmont.
In the 20th Century, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostalism, non-denominational Evangelicalism, and Mormonism were the fastest-growing
Protestant churches. Immigration from Western, Central, and Eastern Africa at the beginning of the 21st Century has increased the
size of Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal and Evangelical communities in Italy, while immigration from Eastern Europe has produced
large Eastern Orthodox communities. Interestingly enough in 2007 I personally met in Perugia, Umbria, Italia a Greek Orthodox
priest from Greece that told me he had gotten permission from the Pope to start the first Greek Orthodox church in Italy.
In 2006, Protestants made up 2.1% of Italy's population, and members of Eastern Orthodox churches comprised 1.2%.
In answer to your question about Islam, while immigrants live largely apart from mainstream Italian society - doing manual or factory
work or scraping a living peddling trinkets or vegetables on the streets - the influx of foreigners in recent years, many
of them Muslim, is rapidly changing the cultural makeup of this Roman Catholic country.
Something else interesting is how St.Francis of Assisi's order is part of the Catholic church but yet different.
Runs parallel with the Catholic church ma e diverso. Seems the Pope of the time didn't much care for it but allowed
it to exist because it became so popular or so I was told by one of my teachers at the Universita di Perugia. I saw
this when I visited Assisi last year. There were these people dressed in robes that seem to be
all spaced out talking about love while all the time moving around spaced out. Something like out of the 60's in the San
Francisco hippy days. Then there were these really nice nuns I met that were helping retarded childern in a center they
run right there next to Francesco's church. They seemed to be very sincere and just different than you average
run of the mill Catholic nuns.
Protestants in Italy - TIME[OPEN_P]The Protestants are making headway among Italy's Roman Catholics. ...
Many converts have been made among gardeners in city parks and porters in ...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...824822,00.html - 36k - Cached - Similar pages
Spiritual Climate in Italy 
(JK)
Linear Mode
