Catholicism In Modern Italy Religion Society And Politics Since 1861 John Pollard by John Pollard 9780203893197, 0203893190 instant download after payment.

Catholicism in Modern Italy is the first work in English to explore fully the role that religion has played in Italy since its unification in 1861. John Pollard shows how the religious beliefs, practices and experiences of the Italian people have changed over the last two centuries. He examines the key question of whether the Catholic Church was consistently anti-modernisation, as is often claimed.

Covering not only Catholicism but also the role of religious minorities such as non-Catholic Christians, Jews and Muslims, John Pollard expertly examines the changing impact of religion on Italian society, and the role it has played in Italian politics in the modern period. In particular, the book considers the extent to which Italian society has been ‘secularised’, but it also analyses the factors that led to the development of religious pluralism in present-day Italy.

Surveying the cultural, social, political, legal and economic dimensions of the Catholic Church, Catholicism in Modern Italy explores the Church’s relationship to the different experiences across Italy over this dramatic period of change and ‘modernisation’. It demonstrates how Italian Catholicism has seen off successive challenges from liberalism, Fascism and Communism, in large part thanks to the presence of the Papacy in the peninsula. John Pollard ends by concluding that, despite the processes of secularisation and the emergence of religious pluralism, the Catholic Church remains a major force in Italian society and politics today.