…in Italy? Sandro Magister reports:

First, he looks at various surveys from the past attempting to gauge Mass attendance levels, quotes the rather optimistic words of Cardinal Ruini and Pope Benedict on the vitality of the Italian church, and then examines a new study, done in the Patriarchate of Venice in 2004 and 2005.

The study took place in two phases.

In the first phase, a questionnaire was handed out to all those who attended the 619 Sunday observance Masses celebrated in the patriarchate of Venice on November 13 and 14, 2004. The form asked each person to say how many other Sunday observance Masses he had participated in over the previous four weeks.

In the second phase, in the spring of 2005, the usual question about Mass attendance was posed to a sample of the population of the patriarchate of Venice. In both cases, the age of the respondents taken into consideration was between 18 and 74.

The responses to the survey provided results close to the national figures over the past thirty years: 26 percent said they went to Mass every Sunday, and another 16.5 percent said they went from one to three times a month. In total, attendance was shown as 42.5 percent of the population of the patriarchate.

But markedly lower attendance figures were shown in the on-the-spot survey conducted in all the churches on November 13 and 14, 2004. Those who said they had gone to Mass on all of the previous four Sundays were 15 percent of the population. And those who said they had gone from one to three times were 7.7 percent. In total, 22.7 percent of the population.

In both of the surveys, the women who practice their faith are more numerous than the men, and Mass attendance increases with higher age and education levels. Castegnaro and Dalla Zuanna comment on this in their essay for “Polis”:

“Our results show a churchgoing population that is much better educated than could have been imagined, and these differences are more intense among the young than among the old: among the regular churchgoers in their thirties, one out of three is a college graduate, while among those in their thirties in the overall population, only one out of ten is a college graduate.”

The most striking result is, nevertheless, the wide gap between Mass attendance as reported by the interviews and as gathered in the churches. Declared attendance is much higher than actual attendance. And those most likely to overstate their religious practice are the persons with the least education.

Another striking element is the almost perfect concordance between actual Mass attendance and the perception that priests have of the matter. The 22.7 percent of practitioners as measured in the field is a percentage almost identical to the estimate given by a sample of priests in the patriarchate of Venice who were interviewed during this same study, apart from coinciding with the widespread impression among Italian priests on the national level.