Look to your people. Faith is not dead; on the contrary, it is returning to the streets

It is no longer in fashion, not in the slightest; in fact, people are flocking to have their names removed. Or so it seems. It is such a commotion that even the protonotaries of the Holy Roman Church and the bishops’ newspapers have become alarmed, taking the matter far more seriously than they once did: the revocation of baptism. Is it really possible to have one’s name removed from the parish register? The latest incident is recent. The Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Laila Medina, has delivered an opinion on the case of a Belgian citizen who, ‘in principle’, asserts that ‘the right to erasure of personal data also applies to baptismal registers’. “It is not only disappointing, but worrying,” thundered L’Avvenire, quoting the Brussels-based Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (blessed be the ecclesiastical Euro-bureaucracy as well). In short, prudence would dictate that each case be dealt with on its own merits, and according to the official documents, the issue is not primarily theological, but rather concerns the thickness of the marker pen used to cross out the name from the parish register: according to the European Court, the name must be rendered illegible.

According to the parish priest, we’ll have to wait and see. These are certainly times when religion is no longer very popular. But can even the memory of a little holy water be erased? What if the people were given a say? On the other side of Europe, in Palermo, a story has been making headlines for months that could overturn a whole host of ideas, prejudices or hasty judgements regarding the premature decline of faith amongst the people: hands off the sacred feasts of Confirmation and Holy Communion. The people – and, above all, the pastry chefs – want to keep them clearly distinct. Archbishop Corrado Lorefice, in agreement with his pastoral offices, has decreed that from now on the two sacraments traditionally reserved for children (and duly celebrated) are to be celebrated at the same time, following five years of proper catechism. Who could complain, if at least the priests take proper care of the youngsters over the long term rather than abandoning them to TikTok? Instead, all hell has broken loose! A celebration is a celebration, and the costs of staging it form a substantial budget that’s been planned well in advance. Across Italy, not just in Brancaccio, entire families are prepared to go to great lengths just to organise the big celebration. Faced with the (double) expense of the sacraments, no one backs down – it’s the tradition of an entire nation.

There is also the economic impact. A committee called ‘Faith, Economy and Community’ has been established by bakers, confectioners, jewellers, wedding favour makers and photographers ‘to protect the hundreds of family-run micro-businesses affected by the decision to celebrate First Communion and Confirmation on the same day’. They have written to the bishop and requested a meeting. Confimprese remains firm, but other artisans side with the bishop: “The growth of a community cannot be entrusted solely to economic and market forces.” Whether it be faith, popular devotion or simply the established tradition of gift-giving, it is all something that will ultimately remain in the hearts of the young people. The faithful are holding their ground; keep your ‘de-baptism’ to yourselves. Or perhaps you’d prefer their rite of passage into adulthood to become like that described by Pascal Bruckner regarding the teenagers setting France ablaze – that is, beating up a policeman or setting fire to a rubbish bin? These are just trivial news items.

Yet a question arises: is popular devotion really in crisis, as has been claimed for decades? Or are we witnessing a mysterious – not to say miraculous – albeit quiet, revival? Strange things are happening, even if we limit ourselves to our devout country. Yet there are many signs that the faith of the people is still far from being a minority phenomenon, even without having to rely on Vannacci’s ‘patriarchy’ or Salvini’s rosaries. These signs may well be contradictory, mind you. Take Padre Pio, for example: a saint for only 24 years, yet venerated by millions of the faithful who are still alive. (Among the most recent recollections is that of Sandro Mazzola, who met him at the start of his career and received absolution from him for a sin of his youth).

In the summer, from San Giovanni Rotondo – “par excellence the place to rejuvenate body and mind, in the spirit of prayer and faith”, as the religious tourism brochures put it – news emerges of a serious crisis: in the first seven months of 2026, visitor numbers fell by 21 per cent and hotel occupancy by 15 per cent. There were even rumours that the friars were prepared to make dozens of sanctuary staff redundant: a claim immediately denied, including by the mayor. But the decline is real; the ‘Jubilee effect’ linked to international pilgrims has faded. Or perhaps it is simply that a form of devotion associated with an ageing generation – in the 1960s, religious and even secular magazines sold millions of copies featuring the ‘Capuchin of Pietrelcina’ – is undergoing a natural decline.

After all, visitor numbers are also falling in Lourdes, which nevertheless still welcomes three million pilgrims a year (and remains France’s second-largest hotel destination after Paris). Yet, as demonstrated by Pope Leo XIV’s recent pilgrimage – which astonished agnostic observers around the world – countless crowds gathered around the Grotto of Massabielle. The young people, who sang in Latin and knelt in the streets of Paris, demonstrated—to the surprise of many—that in France, the ‘beloved daughter’, Christianity is not only not dead, but is being revitalised precisely in its most popular and traditional forms: pilgrimages, shrines and communal prayers. In short, there is hope too for the places dedicated to the people’s religious life.

However, it is arguably best to avoid calling them ‘soul experiences’ or ‘panaceas for the spirit’, as if they were farm holiday resorts. There’s no getting round it: however you look at it, the half-empty glass of the oldest country on the world’s most secularised continent is magically transformed into a glass brimming with fresh water. Much has been said about France, but what of the five million pilgrims who flocked to Assisi for the Jubilee marking the eighth centenary of the ‘Transito’ of the Poverello? The Jubilee of St Francis actually lasted four years – 2023 marks the centenary of the ‘Regola bollata’ and the Greccio Nativity scene. In 2024, the centenary of the Stigmata at La Verna. In 2025, that of the Canticle of the Creatures, and finally the anniversary of his death in 2026 – and one need only look at the visitor figures for all the Franciscan sites both within and outside Umbria to be amazed.

And what about all the pilgrims who do not wish to queue up in the Basilica to see Giotto’s frescoes? They simply move a few streets further on, and there you find the constant stream of people heading to the Santuario della Spogliazione to visit the tomb of Carlo Acutis, the young saint and patron of the Millennials: over a million pilgrims last year. Mostly young people: the elderly no longer feature here; this is where the cream of the youth from all over (France and Spain in particular) come to renew a devotion that smacks of the common people – so far removed from the usual grim portrayal of the younger generations as faithless and ideal-less, lost within a smartphone, which we are so accustomed to painting. The ratings success of the TV film "Il mio nome è Carlo", dedicated to his life, is also noteworthy: broadcast on Canale 5—not typically a millennial-oriented channel—it attracted more than four million viewers, securing a 29 per cent share, a record for the evening. Such figures are usually associated with "Nazionale" or De Martino’s "Pacchi".

Yet the most surprising aspect is that readership was exceptionally high among young people: 32 per cent. And certainly not all of them were ‘Acutis boys’. Something is happening in our town squares, on our streets, in our churches, but above all outside the churches. There was a time – and it still continues – when the only culturally acceptable view in society was that religion was on the wane: every religion, Christianity above all. ‘God is not great,’ wrote Christopher Hitchens, without even needing to add a question mark. ‘Empty churches, full squares’ was one of the catchphrases used by Don Camillo Ruini’s critics against the Church – the Church of the Family Days, of which, in fact, little trace remains. The people’s church had come to a standstill in the days of another Don Camillo, the real one. The friend-enemy of the parish priest of the other church of the Italian twentieth century, Peppone.

Then came the universal deluge of Christianity, faith as a ‘refugium peccatorum’ for old ladies. Popular devotion had become – for theologians and intellectuals of post-Council ‘progressive’ Catholicism – a curse to be fought, far more so than atheistic ideologies and the ‘unbelievers’. For how long, even by parish priests in church, has the faith of the people been viewed with suspicion, as outdated stuff to be replaced with massive doses of voluntary work and refresher courses in the Holy Scriptures? Then, little by little, it is discovered that whilst parishes are struggling, shrines are instead overflowing. Every Saturday night in summer, pilgrimages set off from Rome to Divino Amore; Our Lady of Pompeii counts tens of thousands of rosaries. And the processions—oh my goodness, the processions… Not just those brimming with beauty, art and folklore from the South.

Meanwhile, as increasing percentages of people worldwide are ruining their lives by following gurus and sects (the latest being the case of the ‘Maestro di Almese’ in Val di Susa), as they rush to healers, and as more money is now spent on horoscopes than even on collagen creams, popular religiosity is experiencing a resurgence. And come to think of it, it is the only thing that evokes a genuine people – the opposite of its caricature, populism, which is often tinged with crude, violent impulses. “Viewed with suspicion, relegated to the realm of obsolete things we dare not throw away, sometimes reduced to a folkloric souvenir, devotion has withstood every attempt at erasure and is now re-emerging. The forms may change, but the force that drives it remains: that of affection. It is repopulating the streets, inhabiting the digital world, and expressing humanity’s desire for enchantment even more than that of the divine.” Some might argue that this is a biased perspective, yet the observation appears in Avvenire’s monthly magazine, Luoghi dell’Infinito—a respected publication on art, culture and travel that intelligently explores the relationship between people and the places where the sacred manifests itself. One of the latest issues was devoted to the story of “the age of modern devotions”.

All over the world, but also in our own cities, in our villages, in abandoned churches that have since been revitalised: “Authentic devotion preserves the power of selfless affection and can refute the ‘sad devotions’ of secularisation, showing that the phenomenon is not confined to religion but permeates the bonds of the community”. There is also an article with an intriguing title: ‘Street art: the return of the saints’. It describes a phenomenon that each of us has probably glimpsed in passing. Not just the old newsagents’ kiosks, not just the ‘secular saints’ such as the mural of Totti in Monti or that of Maradona in the Spanish Quarter. There are artists who choose to take religion out of consecrated spaces to recreate a sacred space within everyday life. The street artist Igor Scalisi Palminteri has created a magnificent Saint Benedict the Moor in a run-down square in the Albergheria district of Palermo. On a wall of a block of flats next to the ancient Basilica of Saint Lucy in Syracuse, Andrea Ravo Mattoni has recreated Caravaggio’s The Burial of Saint Lucy, housed in the church itself, creating a striking effect between a car park and a scruffy little park where children play.

It was he who, in Rome, as part of an open-air ‘distributed art gallery’ project at the new Policlinico Gemelli hospital, created a massive mural version of Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy, which is housed in Naples. Perhaps it is precisely this new reclaiming, by a form of devotion once derisively termed ‘popular’, of public spaces that now seemed destined solely for hurried comings and goings, for offices and shopping centres – the true ‘non-places’ devoid of meaning in our time, as the sociologist Marc Augé called them – that reveals just how far from being extinguished the ‘people on the move’ truly are. These are places where the multitudes find a way to become a community once more. Whilst other scholars, such as Marco Revelli just a few days ago, also in Avvenire, speak of the ‘disappearance of the demos’ as a fait accompli – to be followed, or already being followed, by the disappearance of democracy, reduced to technological authoritarianism or populism – something, on the other hand, is reappearing.

A few days ago, the French writer Maxime Chattam – a successful novelist and universally described as ‘the heir to Stephen King’ – gave an interview to La Stampa that was surprising given his usual narrative style, in which he also spoke about faith without resorting to priestly rhetoric: ‘Whether true or false, religions have grown and endured to meet a human need’. People have always asked “that life should not be merely ‘a flash of consciousness’ in eternity”. And religion, he concludes, “is also a return to the tangible, to what keeps us connected to nature in an age where everything is civilisation”. He also says, returning to the themes of his writing, that “the United States has a higher number of serial killers because they are Puritans obsessed with appearances”. We really couldn’t say about that. Yet one might wonder whether our own popular faith—in Saint Barbara and Saint Rosalia, or in the Madonna of Caravaggio—has something to do with the way this ramshackle, amoral Italy of ours holds together, a country where we do a little less harm to one another, at least on public holidays.