In the 2024/25 school year, the number of students opting out of Catholic religious instruction (IRC) has increased by 1%: 42,000 more than the previous year. A secular overtake has occurred in three municipalities. UAAR urges families to make the best educational choice.
Sooner or later, future governments will have to consider a serious reform of Catholic religious instruction in public schools. The number of students choosing not to attend IRC continues to grow steadily, at a rate of about 1% per year. In the 2024/25 school year as well, the share of students opting out of lessons taught by teachers appointed by the bishop rose by 1 percentage point: 17.7%, compared to 16.7% the previous year. That’s an increase of 42,000 students—an even more significant figure given the overall decline of 120,000 in the total student population. If this trend continues in the coming years, participation in this optional program promoted by the Italian Bishops’ Conference will keep shrinking.
The figures, which the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR) has requested for the fourth consecutive year, are official and come from the Ministry of Education and Merit and from the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano.
Unlike the Italian Bishops’ Conference, UAAR does not limit itself to reporting the national figure. The phenomenon has been analyzed in detail across different territorial levels, revealing a two-speed Italy: areas where students are increasingly turning away from Catholic religion class, and others where factors seem to discourage that choice.
In seven regions, more than one in four students opts out of IRC: Valle d’Aosta (34.46%), Emilia-Romagna (30.65%), Tuscany (30.60%), Liguria (30.10%), Lombardy (27.22%), Piedmont (27.02%), and Friuli Venezia Giulia (26.74%).
At the provincial level, six areas reach at least one in three: Florence (40.33%), Bologna (38.91%), Prato (36.65%), Trieste (36.31%), Aosta (34.46%), and Gorizia (34.27%). Compared to the previous year, the increase is widespread: 16 provinces recorded a rise of more than two percentage points, while only five saw a slight decrease.
Looking specifically at municipalities with more than 25,000 inhabitants, there are three cases of a “secular overtake”: Monfalcone (Gorizia, 57.48%), Pinerolo (Turin, 54.66%), and Florence (50.85%). Six other municipalities exceed 45%: Sesto Fiorentino (Florence, 49.56%), Lugo (Ravenna, 49.11%), Bologna (46.92%), Casalecchio di Reno (Bologna, 46.86%), Aosta (46.50%), and Scandicci (Florence, 45.29%). At the bottom of the ranking are the region of Basilicata (3.26%) and the province of Potenza (2.71%). Among municipalities with at least 25,000 inhabitants, there are five cases where fewer than 1% of students opt out: Castellammare di Stabia (Naples), Adrano (Catania), Casoria (Naples), Volla (Naples), and Gragnano (Naples).
“More and more families and students,” says Roberto Grendene, secretary of UAAR, “are choosing not to attend Catholic religion class, even though exercising this right is too often hindered by the lack of valid alternatives and by pressures from within the school system itself. For the Bishops’ Conference, this is supposed to be a free choice—but it is not at all: move IRC outside regular school hours, as is the case for all optional activities, and we’ll see what happens.”
Enrollment for the 2026/27 school year opened yesterday, with a deadline of February 14. “I urge parents,” Grendene concludes, “to make the best educational choice: say no to Catholic religious instruction. And if they encounter difficulties, UAAR will stand by them.”
Press release
Notes
UAAR supports the #datiBeneComune campaign. On the page https://uaar.it/dati-no-irc, all data on opting out of IRC are available, including graphical analyses (by region, province, and type of school), downloadable lists of schools by province in CSV format for further processing, and detailed profiles of each individual school with historical data from recent years.
In the association’s GitHub repository:
https://github.com/UnioneAteiAgnosticiRazionalisti/dati-no-irc
all original files received from the Ministry and from the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano are available.
In compiling national and provincial statistics, data from 357 out of 40,346 schools were prudently excluded as unreliable due to out-of-range opt-out percentages (likely caused by input errors). Had the original data been included, the opt-out percentages would have been slightly higher.