This article analyses the responses of the Catholic Church in Croatia and Italy to the refugee crisis, particularly the churches’ discourses on human rights issues and positions in public debates on refugees and migrants. Although both Catholic churches followed the Church’s teachings on ‘strangers’, associated with providing concrete help to people in need, the Catholic Church in Croatia pursued what can be classified as a charitable approach, while the Catholic Church in Italy followed solidarity and utilitarian approaches. Equally, the Catholic Church in Croatia remained a silent public actor in the refugee crisis, while the Catholic Church in Italy became a prominent actor in public debates, engaging with human rights discourses. The selective and ambivalent uses of human rights discourses emerged as a factor in understanding these two churches’ different positions on refugees and migrants.

This article discusses the construction of the measuring instrument for the study of social perception of religious freedom (SPRF). We provide an overview of existing definitions of religious freedom from a social-science perspective, which ground the empirical research of religious freedom and describe the conceptualization of SPRF. We focus on the operationalization model and introduce the operational variables for the SPRF research, also emphasizing the political, religious, and human rights contexts of independent variables. Finally, the results of exploratory factor analysis that allow to construct the balanced model of SPRF based on statistically weighted factors and scales are presented. The theoretical and statistically tested instrument is discussed as a result of this analysis.

Do social perceptions of religious freedom (SPRF) represent individual a priori experiences, or are they the results of a process of socialisation into a normative political and religious culture? The contribution responds to this inquiry with data from comparative research on the multidimensional construct of SPRF among youth in Italy and Russia (N = 1,810). The study conducted between 2018 and 2019 investigates the patterns of constructed meanings of religious freedom and their correlates in the contexts of Christian-majority cultures, a significant ratio of non-affiliated youth, and contrasting records on societal religious discrimination. The findings suggest, first, that Italian participants endorse the socio-legal and human rights aspects of religious freedom more strongly than their Russian peers, who favoured the issues of individual autonomy linked to this freedom more. Second, attitudes towards normative concepts of religious pluralism, passive secularism, and democracy are robust predictors of the SPRF dimensions in both samples. Third, we found that the main difference in perceptions of religious freedom between the samples is in regard to the predisposition of young people towards a model of the dominant church endorsed by the state. Its predictive power varies across four models of analysis of the SPRF and has the opposite effect in Italian and Russian samples.

This article proposes, tests, and introduces the New Indices of the Functions of Religion (NIFoR) and explores their relevance for explaining individual differences in attitude toward religious freedom. The theory being tested is that openness to the principles of religious freedom is related to perceptions of the functions of religion in society. A review of extant literature on the functions of religion identified eleven conceptually distinct functions. These functions were operationalised by thirty items. Drawing on data provided by 1035 students in Northern Italy, factor analysis reduced these thirty items to seven latent functions of religion. Regression analysis employing these seven latent functions demonstrated that a more positive attitude toward religious freedom was associated with conceptualising religion as primarily concerned with offering meaning and moral guidance.

The article offers a socio-legal analysis of the recent case on freedom of/from religion in Italy, the Coppoli judgment of the Italian Supreme Court, which grants public schools the autonomy to manage religious symbols. The new ruling is discussed in the shadow of the Lautsi case, examining the shift from the discourse of “passive religious symbol” to the framework of “respect of different sensibilities” in pluralistic classrooms. In doing that, first, we provide a sociological framework for the study of “passive religious symbols” from a multiculturalist and religious freedom perspective. Second, the Coppoli case is contextualized within political, normative and judicial Italian contexts following the Lautsi jurisprudence. Third, we revise the model of “secularism as a method of dialogue” considered by the judges as important in claiming individual freedoms of/from religion in the multicultural classroom. The final part of the article provides a discussion and critical considerations about the Coppoli case, problematizing the future challenges of managing religious diversity in Italian public schools. We argue that the dynamic of freedom of/from religion’s jurisprudence in the Coppoli case endorses an additive model of accommodating diverse cultural and religious identities in public schools.