Italy's typical Protestant went from Piedmontese man to southern woman
A Waldensian pastor, Giorgio Bouchard, once remarked that at his birth the typical Italian Protestant was a man from Piedmont with a surname like his own. Today, he said, she is a woman in Campania or Sicily. Behind Italy's Catholic majority lies a quietly shifting religious map shaped by migration and new movements.
Catholicism has dominated Italy since the split between Eastern and Western Christianity, helped by Rome's place in Church history and by Vatican City, the Church's headquarters, sitting as an enclave inside the Italian capital. The Pope is also Bishop of Rome, which ties the Church closely to Italian public life. The country has 225 dioceses, and Church statistics count 57,665,000 baptised Catholics, 96.6 per cent of the population, though that figure ignores whether people actively practise.
Surveys paint a more mixed picture. Pew's 2012 study found 83.3 per cent of residents Christian and 12.4 per cent without religion, and a 2014 Doxa poll found 80 per cent of women called themselves Catholic against 69 per cent of men. Two home-grown Christian bodies sit outside the Latin Church: the Italo-Albanian Catholic Church, an Eastern rite in communion with the Pope, and the Waldensians, a movement born in Lyon in the late 12th century that later embraced Calvinist theology.
The Jewish community, about 40,000 people, is among the oldest anywhere, present since pre-Christian Roman times and continuous despite persecution and expulsions. Native Italian Jews, the core of Rome's community, follow their own Italian rite. Immigration has added far larger groups: in 2023 Muslims numbered roughly 2.3 million and Orthodox believers about 1.8 million, with the Romanian Orthodox Church especially prominent.
Newer movements are growing fast. Jehovah's Witnesses count around 414,000 faithful, including regular attenders, and Buddhists number roughly 360,000. Italy has Europe's second-largest Sikh population after the United Kingdom, with some estimates between 200,000 and 220,000. Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism is rising too, which is exactly the shift Bouchard's quip captures.
Source: Religion in Italy
