~75% of Italians identify as Catholic, and ~50% Spainards. For both countries In Italy, ~15-20% attend church with any regularity. With the pope passing away, I am trying to judge how important the pope feels in cultural terms. Feel free to comment with whatever comes to mind, but if you want some more details about the types of things I am looking for:
- When the Pope visits your country (or even your city), do people genuinely care? For example, I once saw a video of Italians packing streets to catch a glimpse of the Pope’s motorcade. Is this enthusiasm common, or reserved for rare occasions?
- How much does the Pope dominate local news cycles? Do politicians or cultural leaders invoke his words, or is his influence more symbolic?
- Are there stark contrasts between urban and rural attitudes? Old and young?
- Even if you’re not religious, does the Pope’s presence (or statements) ever ripple into your daily life?
- How would you compare the cultural weight of the death of Pope Francis to other iconic figures (e.g., Queen Elizabeth, a beloved head of state, a global celebrity, etc.)?
Comments
The UK is predominantly Protestant. however, a massive chunk is atheist. This, coupled with rising irreligiousness(I think the most recent figures place church attendance at 1.1%), means that nobody really cares about religion or the Pope beyond “Oh, the Pope died? That’s unfortunate.”
Around 20% of the Dutch are Catholic. But I guess the majority of those only count as a statistic. I think few people care about the pope. Most of the ideas of the church are kind of backwards. There are catholic organizations and I guess for the religious people the pope is more significant.
Germans cared a bit about the pope when he was German.
one of the best known headlines ever, in our biggest newspaper, when Ratzinger became pope
“WIR SIND PAPST”
Well, with his last visit in Belgium and the conservative/reactionary comments he made on abortion and gender here, he provoked a new wave of de-christening, debaptizing, many left the church.
Well he was spanish speaking so in Spain we felt him as one of our own
He had some ideas that are supported for both the left and right: we should help the poor people and don’t just focus on politics
He was a good pope
As of the 2021 census more than 80% of Portuguese identified as catholic, but as in many other places actual church attendance is much lower, and more reflective of cultural inercia than anything else.
Having said that, despite the separation of Church and State the RCC still has quite a few exemptions, benefits, and our elites are quite willing to cozy up to it.
Young people generally don’t care about at all about the Pope or only have some mild agreements/disagreements in his words/actions. Older people who are still religious generally more so, for example my grandma is probably shocked atm.
The news about anything pope does/did are almost daily, even more so when he fell ill, now when he died and later when they’ll have to choose a new one. I guess that’s because we’re a nation of old people and they need to sell the news to them too.
Personally the Pope saying “let’s help the poor people” does not meaningfully add something to the discussion, I can see with my own eyes the struggles that happen in the world.
80% of Spaniards identify as non religious, with only 17% being Catholic and 2.6% other religions.
We are culturally Catholic and will sometimes marry in the church ( 20% of weddings ) or baptise our kids ( 47.5% of babies ) basically to please our grandma and receive gifts, but Spain is not a religious country.
Spain is not that Catholic. I spent the Easter season here and people do not really celebrate it, no nice family dinners or lunches, eggs are not a thing…
back when John Paul II was a pope he was very culturally important
but now its a bit less influencial, because the last two popes didnt really say anything that applied to us that much
In Ireland, very subdued reaction here. Obviously its a country greatly associated with Catholicism but it is becoming increasingly more of a historic association.
In 1979, John Paul II managed to gather about 1 million people in Dublin for his visit. He shut down the country – such was the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland at the time. People hung on his every word and worshipped him. They even built a 200ft crucifix in the spot he spoke from.
Francis visited in 2018 – he was challenged publicly by Irish politicians and he gathered a very small fraction of what John Paul did 46 years ago. It was pathetic by comparison. He seems like a liberal figure and one of the better ones in recent memory, but the institution is gravely wounded in Ireland. It is dying in fact.
Franciszek was top 10 in boys baby names ever since he became Pope in 2013. That probably says a lot.
Sort of a mixed figure in Hungary.
There are older, more conservative religious people who didn’t really like the more “progressive” turn of the Pope (by Catholic Church standards, obviously) like being more supportive towards refugees, and being less against stuff like gay marriage than previous popes. But more progressive people, whether religious or non-religious did welcome his efforts to turn the Church into something at least a bit less conservative, and I think this goes for both Protestants and Catholics (and again, for non-religious people as well, I have seen non-religious people claiming that he was a more respectful figure than previous popes).
It’s a mess trying to figure out how religious Hungary is. The recent census only counts 42.5% of the population as Christians, but there was a huge chunk of people who didn’t answer the question, probably due to how politicized the Church is here, so there are most likely many who are religious, but don’t want to be associated with the government, so didn’t answer this. The older generations at least are pretty religious, Gen X is mostly that with many agnostics and atheists thrown in between, and Gen Z and Millennials are a wildcard, many urban non-religious people there, but it depends.
Then there is migration which actually increases Christianity here, as many migrants here are Ukrainians and Filipinos, with the latter group sort of reviving church attendance in aging rural areas.
I am from Western Ukraine, the majority of the population here is Greek Catholic. Pope John Paul II is very popular, but Benedict XVI and Francis were no less beloved by the people. Of course, they are important for church-going people, but no one will hang their portraits or name streets after them.
Also, many consider Francis to be pro-Russian.
There are monuments to Ivan Paul II and other memorials. He visited Ukraine in 2001 and it was a big event.
John Paul II was HUGE in Ireland.
And it was mainly because he visited. He was the first Pope to visit Ireland and he did it early in his papacy. Irish Catholicism was also at a real peak, so it all just came together into one huge phenomenon.
In a country of 3.5m people, 2.5m of them turned out to see the Pope during his visit. Half of that total crowd (1.25m) turned out on a single day in a park in Dublin. The total population of Dublin was about 1m at that time.
So that reverberated for years afterwards. Mothers had pictures of JP2 taking pride of place near the front door for the next 2 decades.
He died right at the same point that a huge shift was taking place away from the church in Ireland due to the abuse scandals, and Benedict was never a charismatic or likeable person, so the draw of the Pope was serious and irrevocably weakened in Ireland.
Pope Francis made a visit to Ireland in the last couple of years, and they had prepared for crowds of 500k people to turn up. In the end only around 150k people turned out to see him, including considerable numbers of foreign nationals.
Over his whole visit the total number who came to see him was less than 200k.
So it went from 70% of Irish people making the effort to see the Pope in 1979 to 4% who cared enough to go see him in 2018.
As an Irishman, the Pope would probably the biggest object of cultural significance in the world and would dwarf any other political figure.
To put in context, after John Paul II visit in 1979, it seems like virtually every boy born in 1980 was called John Paul
He is held in much more regard than he deserves. He should just be seen as the head of a tiny kingdom and the leader of a cult that protects monsters hurting children, and is against equality for women and homosexuals.
(Western) Southern-European here. Our societies are increasingly secularised, so the cultural significancy od the Papacy will only dwindle with the passing of time. As our Elites are more conservative than the rest of us, the Catholic Church ends up having more social influence than it would otherwise be its due. For instance, the Government in my country declared a day of morning after the Pope died despite the separation of Church and State inscribed in our Constitution and only a handful of rationalists will even bother to say “boo”. This Pope managed to gather some sympathy due to his relative progressive attitudes on a number of issues, but that’s the end of it. The Church is still mired in child abuse scandals and that’s a stain on its public image that can’t be washed away.
Portuguese guy here.
On the latest (2023) official poll on religiosity in Catalonia the results are quite interesting:
Here you have the full report: https://afersreligiosos.gencat.cat/web/.content/04_diversitat-religiosa/barometre/Informe-CEO_VF.pdf
France used to be a major catholic country but nowadays it accounts for about a quarter of the population.
So it is not that important but as I do have Corsican family, the fact that he visited the island recently and considering that 90% of Corsicans are catholics it saddened ppl over there.
John Paul II was obviously very important for us. Though, it’s important to point out that his cult of personality in Poland grew to such ridiculous highs in early 2000s, that it generated cultural backslash and was one of the main reasons why Polish Church lost most of young people. The following popes weren’t as popular. A lot of people were initially exited for Francis, but Polish attitudes towards him soured massively after russia invaded Ukraine. His refusal to name the aggressor wasn’t looked kindly at in Poland.
It’s politically significant more than anything else. The political influence the Vatican has in Italy is insane.
When John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979, the Pope was loved, and we were a practicing Catholic country.
I was in Ballybrit, Galway when he said “Young people of Ireland I love you” I felt as if he spoke directly to me.
More than 50% of the population of the country attended an event with the Pope during his visit.
By the time Francis visited in 2018, the Pope was estranged from a culturally Catholic, but largely secular country.
All I remember about that visit was trump-like arguments about crowd sizes.
Less than 5% of the population of the country attended an event with the Pope during his visit.
In just under 40 years, the church in Ireland had largely become irrelevant to the majority of Irish people.
The sexual abuse scandals, the mother and baby home scandals, the church fumbled their message time and time again on the wrong side of many social issues that the country cared about, like divorce, same-sex marriage, abortion. Ireland had become a progressive liberal country and the Catholic Church was just not equipped to change with the needs of the people and got left behind.
Italian. I was having dinner at 20:50. The first 8 channels of my tv only had specials about the pope. 9th had some kind of food documentary. 10 was back on the pope again. It’s going to be like this for most of the next ten days. Then they’ll elect a new pope and they will make specials about him. If he will be Italian or has Italian roots they’ll leave no stone unturned to interview whoever met him or it’s his relative. It’s going to be wild.
Italian proverb goes: “morto un Papa se ne fa un altro “, translates like “dead one pope, one makes another”… can’t speak for every Italian but this is how I feel.
France here.
We’re nominally catholic for historical reasons, being sometimes called “the eldest daughter of the Church”. The relationship between the Kingdom of France and the Papacy has been intense, to say the least. Also worth noting that the early French Republics were strongly opposed to the Church, which culminated in the 1905 law of separation between church and state. That resulted in a bit of a purge, and a long-standing defiance towards anything religious from state employees.
Nowadays, it’s very much a mixed bag. Some places or socioeconomic circles still cling to the Church, either in its current form or to the traditionalist one. There’s a renewal of faith from immigrants (and their kids), sometimes as regular catholics but also as new Evangelical denominations, typically from Western Africa.
There’s also a large part of France that either has a passive, uninterested legacy connection to the Church, or is actively hostile to it. There’s been a lot of sex abuse scandals brought to light during the last couple of years, and our PM is currently embroiled in a particularly spicy one.
So that’s for context. On the ground, it’s still a major news item. The noon news on the public Woke Radio was nearly entirely about that, and they weren’t shy about using titles like “the Pontiff” or stressing the importance of his stance wrt his position.
I think most people do care somewhat, if only for the folklore of it. Popes have existed for longer than France has, and for a while we even had our own, so it’s just one of the constants of the universe. Even if they’re not active believers, I’d say that most French people did discuss it today.
Español , a mi me da igual no soy católico mas que en navidad ,mi biblia es el estatuto de los trabajadores , pero prefiero un Papa amable y “de izquierdas”,(ya se que eso aquí no es demasiado correcto), a un puto plasta que crea que todo es pecado y que deberíamos fustigarnos con un látigo por las noches antes de ir a dormir. Quiera yo o no , esa actitud traspasa a la sociedad y les da a los católicos un +10 en pesadez.
Italian here. From Rome.
The numbers you posted are way, way bloated.
Less than 30% of Italians are genuine Catholics.
Yes, there’s a huge difference between the older generations and the younger generations.
Virtually everyone was Catholic in the past. Most young people are not.
Yes, there’s a huge difference between the rural areas (more religious) and urban areas, but not nearly as much as between older and younger people.
Is a pal visit a big deal? In a village maybe not in most cities.
How prominent is the Pope in the news? Not much, usually it’s a small bit at the end of the news maybe once a week. Usually about some sort of declaration/trip abroad.
How relevant is religion in politics? 0%. It was significantly more prominent 20+ years ago. Now nobody cares.
That said, this Pope was generally speaking well liked.
The pope visit Belgium last year, he was mostly being questioned about the lack of action the Vatican has taken to stop and pursue child molesting priests. Later he did Sunday mass in a football stadium and they couldn’t even fill all the seats.
He then ended his visit by telling some journalists on the plane back that abortion performing doctors are “killers for hire”, which our government nor our population liked.
So yeah, the pope isn’t that important to the Belgians and that’s mostly because of the Vatican and their horribly outdated policies.
Dutch here. As everybody knows, the biggest religion (when not counting people who claim “no religion”) over here is Catholic and has been for over a century (zoek maar op bij CBS als je me niet gelooft, lezer van boven de rivieren). Large parts of the country are also Catholic culturally and I live in those parts.
In general the pope feels like someone on a distance, I feel his influence over here is less than in some other Catholic countries. Having said that, at first we were generally glad with a more modern, liberal pope. But after a while it felt like it didn’t actually change much for Dutch Catholicism so the enthusiasm waned a bit.