UAAR invites approximately 5,000 school principals to adopt Alternative Activity textbooks and will donate the books to the remaining classes. Alternative Activity textbooks are not yet a guaranteed right in Italian schools, but things are changing. Thanks to the “Books for Those Entitled to Them” campaign, which the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics launched again this year, a growing number of state primary schools have chosen to adopt the textbook for the Alternative Activity program. During the 2024/25 school… Read more »

  Following UAAR’s recent press release titled “Escape from Catholic Religion Classes Isn’t Stopping”, which received widespread coverage in the Italian media, reactions were swift from Snadir, the autonomous national union of religion teachers, which represents 34% of religious education teachers working in Italian schools. Its national secretary Orazio Ruscica responds every year in an uncoordinated manner in an attempt to discredit the Uaar. This year too, Ruscica accused us, in the online newspaper Tecnica della Scuola, of having obtained… Read more »

The UAAR has once again knocked on the door of the Ministry of Education and Merit and the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano with a general civic access, recovering data on attendance at Catholic religious education (IRC) in Italian state schools. Students who chose not to attend religious education, which are still archaically and disrespectfully called “exempted,” reached a record number of 1,164,000 (+68,000), rising from an average of 15.5% in 2022/23 to 16.62% in 2023/24. Analyzing the provincial… Read more »

Five years to celebrate, but UAAR reports that something isn’t adding up: municipalities aren’t promptly sending updated data on living wills to the Ministry of Health. February 1, 2025, marked an important anniversary. Five years ago, in 2020, the Database of Advance Treatment Directives, also known as living wills, was established. The Ministry of Health’s database, which should contain the advance treatment directives filed by Italian citizens, however, does not reflect the country’s true end-of-life situation. The Union of Rationalist… Read more »

Bishops blessing schools, hospital wards, and sections of highways; institutional representatives attending Masses and religious events; rivers of money flowing from state coffers to flood those of dioceses and parishes: the year now drawing to a close, in obsequious continuity with previous years, has also been a flourish of “clericalism.” This is the picture that emerges from “Clericalata della settimana”, the section of the website of the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR), which monitors the actions and statements… Read more »

The 2024/25 edition of the campaign “Books for Those Who Have a Right to Them” has officially begun. State primary schools that apply can receive textbooks to distribute to children participating in the Alternative Activity program. After a year, the UAAR (Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics) is once again donating textbooks in order to support the Alternative Activity program. Such a program serves to provide an alternative to Catholic religious instruction in Italian state primary schools. While the imposition… Read more »

Given the Government’s culpable and “religious” silence, the UAAR (Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics) has made all information about school building projects which are funded by the 8×1000 state allocation easily accessible. An interesting fact emerges from analyzing the allocation rankings for 8×1000 state funds earmarked for “School Building” projects: over €20 million will ultimately be allocated to the renovation of public schools. A total of 57 school buildings will benefit from such a funding which will be directed… Read more »

The conceptual artist and Florentine architect Guido Mitidieri is the winner of the inaugural UAART Prize with his diptych Agony of Identity (2020). The winning artwork was selected by a professional jury of over 280 entries and seven finalists. Promoted by the social promotion association UAAR (Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics), the aforementioned competition—which was open to all forms of visual art—aims to construct a secular imagery which surrounds themes of death and grief. Mitidieri’s work was deemed as… Read more »