Italians – especially millennials – are becoming more sceptical of the Pope
Pope Francis spent much of this past weekend entertaining young people from all over Italy – some 70,000 of them, to hear the Vatican tell it – who had come to Rome with the Italian bishops’ national service for youth ministry.
The bishops organised the week-long pilgrimage as part of their efforts to prepare for the general assembly of the synod of bishops, which is scheduled to convene later this year to explore “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment”.
On Saturday, at the Circus Maximus, Pope Francis fielded questions from four young people, regarding topics that ranged from the hopes and dreams of young people and their realisation, to peer pressure and risk aversion when it comes to matters of the heart, to the ways in which young Christians can most effectively bear witness to the Gospel in their lives.
The Pope told the young people: “Great dreams include [everyone], involve [others]: they are outward-looking.” He noted that the transformation of dreams into reality takes not only courage, but also hard work and discipline, for which wise and good teachers are an indispensable guide and support.
The Pope told his audience not to be afraid of commitment: “If love comes today, why wait three or four of five years to render it stable?” Then he told them that offering a living witness is the best and most effective sermon, more powerfully attractive than the most eloquent homily.
It’s good advice, but the question is: did anyone really hear it?
Seventy thousand people can fill a very large stadium. If they seem like a good-sized group when they’re all together, they’re still only about 350 people per Italian diocese.
If recent polls are anything close to accurate, then there is reason to believe Pope Francis is not as popular in Italy as he once was, particularly among young people.
Italy’s leading centre-left daily La Repubblica published a piece last week detailing the results of a Demos-Pi poll, showing the Holy Father’s favourability rating at 71 per cent, down 16 points overall from its high-water mark of 88 per cent in the year of his election, 2013. The poll registers a more precipitous dip among young people aged 15-24: they have fallen from 83 per cent to 58 per cent.
The sociologist of religion Enzo Pace was quoted in La Repubblica as attributing the general drop to “an inability to make inroads with the structure of ecclesiastical power”. That may well be the case, but it isn’t the thing on which youth support for the Pope usually hinges.
Italy’s population more generally appears to be suffering from crisis fatigue, especially insofar as migration is concerned. For several years running, Italy has borne the brunt of the crisis, with the country’s coastguard doing yeoman’s work in the Mediterranean, while on terra firma, Italians feel they have shown great tolerance and forbearance toward what for many of them is an unresponsive EU apparatus in Brussels.
Catholics in the last election supported the right-wing nationalist and eurosceptic Lega party roughly along with the rest of the population, but Italians have a knack for separating politics and religion. It’s a necessary coping mechanism in a country where Church and state often seem so intertwined with one another it’s hard to tell which represents God and which Caesar.
The Pope might not like that Italians have turned to the right – though he’s not spoken directly about politics on the boot – but Italians, even those who have taken that turn, still report a strongly favourable impression of the Holy Father.
Young people are concerned about high unemployment, the difficult labour market and a finance system in the country that makes getting anything from venture capital to a home loan more challenging than they feel it ought to be. But those problems are structural in Italy – they’ve been around a good, long while – and no one expected Francis to fix them, or even try. He’s not a politician. If he were, a 58 per cent favourable rating in any demographic would still be a good showing.
Still, a drop like the one registered in the Demos poll does raise eyebrows, and perhaps alarm bells in the Vatican, where the Pope’s popularity with young people has been a principal vaunt.
One moment on Saturday at the Circus Maximus was, perhaps, telling. A 27-year-old palliative care nurse, Dario, told Pope Francis: “The useless pomps and frequent scandals make the Church short on credibility in our eyes.” The Pope’s answer was to say: “The scandal [is] in a formal, not a witnessing Church; the scandal of a Church that is closed, because it does not go out.”
That’s one way to put it, and it is classic Francis, but it is not a frank recognition of the failures in leadership the recent scandals have brought to light.
Francis’s words about clericalism, which followed his remarks about an outward-looking Church, did not come to an assumption of responsibility, either.
“Clericalism, which belongs not only to clerics, is an attitude that touches all of us: clericalism is a perversion of the Church.” He’s not wrong.
Christopher Altieri
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