Towards a Common Sense Religion? The Young and Religion in Italy

The culture of pluralism, understood as the legitimation of the most diverse life options, seems to unite more and more both church-goers and non church-goers, even in a country like Italy where Catholicism still holds a position of “relative monopoly”. A research carried on with a sample of 800 Italian eighteen year old young people has highlighted their opinions about a few particularly “hot” questions inside Catholicism: women’s and homosexual people’s ordination, priests’ marriage, Holy Communion for divorced people who are re-marrying, the relation between various religions and truth. Although a few differences remain between those who regularly take part in religious rites and those who don’t, a “common sense religion” seems to be emerging which, through progressive erosion of the differences between these two groups, legitimates the freedom of choice for the individuals, especially for what concerns the ambit of the individual life.