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sport j2 money culture scene video subscription THE FALL OF RELIGIOUSNESS Half of them do not enter into church marriages, only 38% believe in the Church: Do Croats give up on God? Although membership in the religious community in Croatia is high, other indicators suggest that church religiosity is declining. Writes: Filip PavićPosted: October 3, 2020 1:30 pm 8930585 A record half a million believers in Germany officially left their churches last year. Since the Germans have a system of taxation of their believers, the exact number is also known: 272,770 Catholics and 270,000 Protestants no longer pay taxes for their churches, and thus they have ceased to be their members for these institutions. The same was done last year by 68,000 Austrians and 56,000 Finns in their homelands. A month ago, too, Ronald Inglehart , a professor at the University of Michigan, published an extensive study “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religiosity” conducted in 49 countries around the world. It has been shown that in the last 12 years, religiosity has fallen in as many as 43 countries, with the exception of countries such as India, Bulgaria and Russia. What do these global, and especially European, trends say about the state of religiosity in Croatia? While our statistical hope in recent years is that we have 86 percent Catholics, the question is whether the new 2021 census will reveal a drastic decline. Will we see a religious exodus of German proportions in Croatia as well? On this trail, purely as an illustration, says theologian Peter Kuzmič , it would be interesting to see statistics on how many now evicted Croats in Germany pay religious taxes for the Catholic Church. A small number, he supposes, though there are nearly 400,000 of them there. They easily, he says, renounced their faith for material gain. It is easy in Croatia. A believer who leaves the church here has no financial benefit. By the way, Catholicism in our country is not free, it is paid from the budget, in the end it comes to the same thing, but it still seems not as painful as giving 8 percent of the salary, which is the case in Germany. Therefore, 86 percent of Croats can carelessly declare themselves Catholics. Specifically, 3 of them, .697,143 according to the 2011 census (when there were still half a million more of us than now). All this, according to Kuzmič, speaks in favor of the thesis that in our country religiosity is largely a matter of folklore rather than true belief. This stems in part from the fact that secularization was imposed in Yugoslavia, and then in the turbulent 1990s the national merged with the religious. - In our country, children are still baptized regardless of whether the parents are believers or not. That baptism, therefore, is not an initiation into a religion, but a part of folklore. We can say that religiosity without spirituality is at work. Because how else to explain that we are a highly religious country according to all statistics, and at the same time we have such a high percentage of immorality and corruption. Then it is not religiosity, but a kind of collectivist identity - explains Kuzmič. We could cynically add that immorality and corruption do not go in spite of religious doctrine, especially in the context of Catholicism, but because of it. Namely, we have the sacrament of confession, which presupposes sin in itself, so that the remission of sins could occur at all. But let’s get back to the numbers. Siniša Zrinščak , a professor at the Department of Sociology at the Zagreb Faculty of Law who has been studying the sociology of religion for 30 years, does not care about true belief. He is interested in numbers and data. And the data tells us that the new census will not bring any dramatic ups and downs in the number of those who will declare themselves members of a religious community. There may be only a small drop. - According to all our research, that figure will not go below 80 percent. It may not be 86 percent or 88, but there should not be big differences compared to previous years - Zrinščak assumes. By the way, in the last seventy years the number of Catholics in Croatia has fluctuated. In the context of sociological considerations, these are not too large deviations, but they are noticeable. According to the 1953 census, there were about 74 percent Catholics in Croatia, in 1991 about 77 percent, and in 2001 about 88 percent, and in 2011 it was about 86 percent. However, if we look at the ten years apart, from the beginning of 2000 (after the death of President Franjo Tudjman and the coming to power of the SDP) until 2008, there has been a sharp decline - from almost 87 percent to 79 percent of Catholics. Afterwards, the situation improved a bit. If we recalculate this within the framework of the then population, it would be about 330 thousand believers who, after the turbulent 90s, slowly gave up Catholicism, in one decade. This is confirmed by the results of research from 2018 conducted as part of the international project European Values ​​Study, which was conducted in our country within the Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb. According to these surveys, the number of Catholics in Croatia is around 81 percent (for 2018). According to sociologists, this should be approximately the percentage that will be confirmed by the census next year. At the same time, according to the same research, the number of those who do not belong to any religion has increased - from 11 percent to 18 percent and the number of declared atheists from three percent to five percent. According to Zrinščak, these figures are not so drastic that we could talk about a large Croatian trend of declining religiosity. And especially not about joining European trends and the German exodus. As he says, due to the large differences between European countries, it is difficult to draw such general conclusions. - We have countries like the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Estonia where religiosity is consistently low, and on the other hand countries like Poland, Romania and Portugal where the religiosity of the population is extremely high. We can, on a general level, talk about the process of secularization and the decline of the Church's influence, but the situations are different for each country, so we should not equate these trends - he says. In Poland, which is most similar to Croatia, almost 93 percent of the population professes to be Catholic. On the other hand, a surprising 66 percent of Czechs say they do not believe in God at all, compared to 29 who do, and some of them again do not belong to any religious community. It is similar in Germany, where only half of the population, or 52 percent, belongs to a church, that is, pays taxes - Protestants and Catholics are equally represented there. Therefore, the religious situation in Germany cannot be compared to that in Croatia, warns Krunoslav Nikodem, professor at the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. The withdrawal of Germans from religious communities, he says, has concrete reasons. - The reason for that is mostly not the scandals we have been able to read about in recent years, I was warned about that by my German colleagues with whom I spoke. Namely, membership is falling in both Catholic and Protestant churches. Basically, the reasons are, if we exclude the aging of the local population because retirees do not pay church tax, the changes that have taken place in Germany since 2015 when the church tax included capital gains tax. Part of the citizens then left their church to avoid paying such an increased church tax - Nicodemus notes. Ground floor reasons. On the other hand, the situation in Croatia is somewhat more complex. The personal religiosity of Croats is not declining, but church religiosity is declining. In other words, as Zrinščak explains, two things should be said: on the one hand, the rise of individual religiosity, and on the other, the decline of church religiosity. This means that although the affiliation with the religious community in Croatia is high, all other indicators related to religiosity, such as going to church, are declining. RELATED NEWS Hagia Sophia THE FATE OF AJA SOFIA Erdogan succeeds in plan: Once the largest Christian church, now a museum, will become a mosque again SURVEY BEFORE THE ELECTION HDZ against the revision of the agreement with the Vatican, SDP without answer, Kerum against the secular state Contradiction? Not necessarily, Zrinščak believes, people can still be considered religious, spiritual, and interpret the religious principles of a particular church for themselves. All this can be seen in the new data on the number of church weddings, the level of trust in the Church as an institution, the opinions of believers on sexual morality, and especially in the figures concerning going to Mass. Thus, the research "Between distant ecclesiology and intense personal religiosity" by Zrinščak and Krunoslav Nikodem from 2018 shows that believers go to church less and less every year. Nearly 40 percent of declared Catholics, according to their data, admit to going to Mass never or rarely. In the last twenty years, too, weekly church attendance has dropped from 31 percent to 22 percent. The number of those who go to church once a month has also dropped from 21 percent to 12 percent. Here it is convenient to compare the number of those who pray outside the church. About 40 percent of believers said they pray to God every day, and 20 percent of respondents never do, according to their survey. It is also interesting to note that a great leap in prayer has taken place in the last ten years. The number of those praying every day jumped from 30 percent in 2008, before the global financial crisis, to 40 percent in 2018. All this, as Professor Nicodemus told us, testifies that, despite the distance from the Church, religiosity in Croatia is still extremely high. - We must be careful in marking religious changes in Croatian society. Namely, research does not show a general trend of decline of believers, but shows a decrease in church religiosity and the stability of personal religiosity. So, in the last 20 years in Croatian society there has been no significant decline in the number of believers and an increase in the number of infidels, but there have been some changes within the religious population where some believers have distanced themselves from the Church and church teaching - he explains. According to him, Croats do not suffer from a lack of spirituality. Moreover, they are more interested in the spiritual and the religious than ever before, but, at the same time, they are not inclined to have someone else tell them what and how they should live, work, believe. This breakthrough of individualization, according to Nicodemus, although it may sound emancipatory, has its "dark sides". - The only authority that people accept today is the authority of their own opinion, which is mostly not based on facts and experience but on subjective desires and feelings. But this dominance of subjective feelings and desires over external authority (God, state, nation, family), however tempting it may seem because it represents the freedom of the individual, also has its “dark side”. Mostly because it opens the possibility of uncritical acceptance of another external authority, and this is one of the reasons for the rise of political authoritarianism, which is especially visible in some European countries - says Nicodemus. The "authority of one's own opinion" of Croatian Catholics is also evidenced by the fact that trust in the Catholic Church and its institutions has fallen. In the last twenty years, trust in the Church in Croatia has had an unprecedented decline - from 63 percent to 38 percent. Moreover, the number of those who have no confidence in the Catholic Church has jumped in the last two decades from five percent to as much as 20 percent. But, says Nicodemus, it should be said that the decline in the trust of Croats is reflected in all institutions. Thus, trust in Parliament fell to a meager seven percent, in the Government to nine percent, and the judiciary to 14 percent. The smallest drop in confidence, by the way, in the army, is a solid 61 percent. Nicodemus believes that there can be a number of reasons why Catholics no longer trust the Church, but it is primarily a matter of the church "entering politics". - The decline in trust in the Church is generally not related to scandals, which is the predominant opinion, but primarily refers to church political activity and alignment with one political option. There is also non-transparency of action, especially in relation to finances, and the alienation and disagreement of citizens with certain parts of church teaching, such as sexual morality. It seems that the Church continues to operate according to the patterns and ways in which it operated during the communist period, but the political, socio-cultural and economic context has changed significantly, which then requires a different operation of the Church - says Nicodemus. From all this it can be concluded that Nicodemus and Zrinščak do not find a problem in the existence of declarative Catholics and practicing Catholics. For their research, a Catholic is also one who does not adhere to Catholic principles. However, their fellow sociologist of religion Ivan Markešić will not go over it lightly. He says that the phenomenon of "belonging without faith" is at work in Croatia. In it, it is more important to declare oneself a member of the Catholic Church than to practice Catholic doctrine on a daily basis. - These are people who are nominally Catholics because they were baptized according to the Roman Catholic or Greek Catholic rite, but the other story is how many of them have any contact with the rites of the Catholic Church. Most of them had or will have only two meetings with the church: on the occasion of baptism and on the occasion of burial - Makešić illustrates. Although this is largely confirmed by the data on attending Mass (there are only 20 percent of those who go to Mass on Sundays in a disciplined manner), there is another indicative data - the number of weddings. Namely, church weddings have been in sharp decline in recent years. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 63 percent of marriages took place in the church ten years ago, and today it is only 50 percent. This would mean that half of all marriages today take place with the registrar, civil, not in the church. However, warns Makešić, it should be taken into account that the number of divorces has increased in recent years. Since every third marriage in Croatia, according to current statistics, ends in divorce, and the number of remarried increases, this is partly the answer. - Namely, when a church marriage breaks down, the spouses cannot confirm the new marriage in the church. They thus become a special group within the Church deprived of the sacraments, including the sacraments of confession and communion. Those who enter the marital waters before the registrar, and not before the priest, still have the opportunity to start a new marriage 'carefree' in the event of a divorce and reaffirm their marital fidelity in the church - explains Makešić. In addition to weddings, the clash of civil and religious can be seen in the example of attending religious education, a topic that has been brought up again these days. Leaving aside the (un) justification of religious education in the school system, statistics on student enrollment in religious education, ie ethics, in primary and secondary schools reveal interesting correlations, and could potentially speak of some future religious trends when these students grow up and become parents themselves. Namely, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Education, religious education was attended by almost 89 percent of students in Croatian primary schools last year, and 76 percent in secondary schools. Five years ago, as noted by fellow journalist Mirela Lilek, 92 percent of students attended religious education in primary schools and 80 percent in secondary schools. In numbers, therefore, we can say that in the last five years, about 1,100 primary school students and about 1,500 secondary school students have dropped out of religious education. However, although the percentages of religious education in schools are still high, and the lowest are only in Istria and Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, where the situation is probably half-and-half, a survey of the Zadar Archdiocese released this month showed that most of these students do not heritage of traditional Catholic values. A survey conducted on 750 high school students between the ages of 14 and 19 found that 96 percent of them attend religious education and 90 percent declare themselves as believers. But only 58 percent of them go to religious education of their own free will, the other 42 percent, as they say, attend religious education under parental pressure. In doing so, most respondents (exact percentages have not yet been released) support premarital sex, contraception, abortion, legalization of same-sex marriage, homosexual experiences, Sunday work, euthanasia, soft drug use, etc. Thus, Catholic high school students support anything contrary the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Hypocrisy, theologians say, is a complex social reality, sociologists say