Contested Professionalism and Spiritual Legitimization: Catholic Religious Education Teachers and the Theme of Spirituality in Contemporary Italian Schools

Abstract

Based on observations and in-depth interviews with Catholic Religious Education teachers in Italy, this sociological study tackles “spirituality” as a register of legitimization in their professional settings. Compared with more established topics of “religious culture”, the motives of “spirituality” appear as a lesser category of justification in teachers’ discourse in two significant aspects: teaching about “spirituality” as a necessary component of human experience, and talking about their own relationship to “spirituality” as proof of sincere commitment and/or professionalism. Thus, in the context of teachers’ labor, “spirituality” constitutes an ambivalent category that can serve the purposes of Catholic institutions as well as forms of criticism of authority.

1. Introduction

In the diverse fields of social sciences of religion, spirituality is probably one of the most ambiguous topics, partly due to radical disagreements about its different meanings. This is illustrated by its semantic evolution from its Christian theological etymology to its relation to the category “religion” (Giordan 2016, pp. 201–4), its redefinitions since the second half of the 20th c., and circulations between categories of spirituality, occultism, and New Age movements. The term “spirituality” outlines the relations of interdependence between religious institutions and forms of “bricolage”, in practices and beliefs, often in the shadow of institutional patterns (Palmisano and Pannofino 2020, pp. 23–25). The social competition between established, marginal, and reputedly new organizations in diverse national religious fields is not separate from issues of renegotiated power relations in these societies (Wood 2021), despite imagery of deep individual emancipation, authenticity, and choice, as opposed to authority and “dogma”, in “spirituality”. These dynamics of power in “spirituality” also appear in professional, specialized social spaces such as the educational sector, and they outline its discursive uses on which this article focuses. These uses of “spirituality” as a justification, in some professional settings, are less often taken into account, while their incorporation into religious institutions in Europe has been considerably covered by research in the past decades (Palmisano and Pannofino 2017). Types of Religious Education have long been studied in terms of efficiency in religious transmission (Milot 1991; Hourmant 1995; Béraud and Willaime 2009) and as cases of recognition of pluralism or forms of management of religious diversity (Frisina 2011; Martínez-Ariño and Griera 2020). Patterns of “secularization of curricula” and the renegotiation of contents have been outlined (Voyé and Dobbelaere 2003; Willaime 2014). Yet, the place of professional practices of justifications, or a “rhetoric of spirituality” (Palmisano and Pannofino 2020, pp. 25–26), is less accounted for in some pedagogic functions.

This sociological non-normative contribution focuses on these discursive practices in the school subject of Catholic Religious Education (Insegnamento della religione cattolica, hereafter, IRC) in Italian State schools. Historically formed as a catechesis controlled by the Catholic Church, Religious Education was made compulsory with the 1923 Gentile law, starting from primary schools, and used as an instrument for the “Conciliation” between the Holy See and the Italian State during the fascist period (Guasco 2014), defined as “foundation and coronation of Public Instruction” (art. 36 of the 1929 Lateran Concordat). However, Religious Education (the implicit adjective “Catholic” was legally added to the title of the subject only after the revision of the Concordat in 1984) changed, gradually in its management and more quickly in its legal underpinnings, during the last quarter of the 20th century. In its management, the habitual division of labor between schoolteachers in primary schools and clerics (priests, nuns, monks) in part-time positions in secondary schools was slowly sidelined by the recruitment of teachers specialized in the subject, increasingly lay Catholics, after the Second Vatican Council. In its legal framework, the subject, which was renamed IRC, was made formally non-compulsory (art. 9 of the 1984 Agreement of revision of the Concordat), with no effect on pupils’ marks. Its conflictual implementation started even before the first 1986–1987 schoolyear with IRC, while Roman Catholicism was no longer the religion of the Italian State due to this revision of the Concordat. Activists resorted to administrative courts, while renegotiations between Italian political parties and the Catholic Church opened a transitional period between 1984 and 1992, maintaining uncertainties about alternative subjects to IRC and modalities for opting out (Butturini 1987; Giorda 2013). The revision of curricula followed the new legal justification of IRC by the inclusion of Catholicism as “part of the national heritage of the Italian people” and the “value of religious culture” (art. 9.2 of the 1984 Agreement). They contributed to changing the parameters of professional organization and legitimization for IRC teachers, along with the diffusion of intellectual expertise from pedagogists on “religious culture” in a non-confessional perspective through Catholic professional journals such as Religione e Scuola (Pazzaglia 2014). Concomitantly, since the 1990s, the visibility of “new” religious minorities such as Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Pentecostals, Hindus, and Sikhs, in addition to historic Jewish and Protestant communities, with the extension of acts of State recognition of religious organizations through intese (art. 8 of the 1948 Constitution), have also impacted the composition and the management of Italian schoolrooms.

It would be misleading to reduce the lexicon and the motives of “spirituality” in IRC to a merely strategic, cynical justification for a subject formally monopolized by the Italian Catholic Church. Indeed, “spirituality” has a broad practical social relevance and thus operates as a register of justification for IRC teachers and their administrators when facing criticism or presenting their goals in ordinary settings. It serves narrative purposes and can help further professional recognition from peers (Le Pape 2015, pp. 19–28). In this regard, agents make use of verbal arguments from different, irreducible, orders of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999). As a lexical field, the register of “spirituality” presents the characteristics of “inspiration”, an opposition to rationalistic and economic calculation, although it also provides a defense against criticism. Although the pragmatic implications of justification could be discussed normatively in social theory (Honneth 2010), the focus of this article is on discursive practices about IRC as a component of professional practices. The discursive register of “spirituality” is made of motives—individual choice, out-of-the-ordinary beliefs, less dogma than experience, etc.—that can be used discursively in contradictory ways. It can acquire a practical relevance due to peculiar working conditions for teachers and staff, including diversified public and situational requirements beyond the curricula. Problematizing the place of “spirituality” in professional legitimization implies relating the register of “spirituality” and the institutional order, assigned positions, and division of labor between IRC teachers, teaching “colleagues”, families, and Catholic parishes (Turina 2011; Altglas 2012; Edwards 2019). In that regard, the discourse of justification is not detached from unequal relations and power between teachers, colleagues, and diocesan staff, as well as challenges to maintain a pedagogic authority. How does “spirituality” become part of professional practices including those dealing with categorial legitimization in this school subject of Religious Education? In what pedagogical and teaching-related practices does it appear as a relevant register of justification?

Built upon contents of interviews and observations about IRC teachers as professionals in the division of religious labor (Béraud 2007, pp. 41–69), my argument is that “spirituality” provides a minor but significant form of justification, along with prevalent cultural-notional motives in public debates and interactions. It allows for the redefinition of some curricular contents directed toward personal exchanges. Yet, “spirituality” also provides grounds for teachers to justify, in some situations, under certain conditions of practical and cognitive resources, their alternation between two prescribed roles: the role of exemplary Catholic layperson and the role of “colleague” among the school’s staff, sharing “a community of fate”, professional habits, and know-how (Goffman 1959, pp. 155–66). While this register does play a part in the Catholic institutional rhetoric of justification of IRC, it also shows some consequences of the statutory ambiguity of IRC in contemporary settings.

1.1. Theoretical Framework

This article engages with one subfield of research on religious labor, at the crossroads between the sociology of religion in the public sphere (Casanova 1994; Portier 2016), the sociology of labor (Hughes 1984; Becker 2010), and the political sociology of public institutions and State policy sectors (Galembert 2018; Frégosi and Silhol 2017). This research field sheds light on how new roles and hybridization of practices (pedagogical goals and religious transmission, healthcare, and spiritual presence…) renegotiate rules both inside established religious institutions (Béraud 2007; Lagroye 2006) and in State services (Jouanneau 2013). Furthermore, studying practices, including practices of legitimization, in the division of religious labor also allows for an understanding of how the social making of “spirituality” interacts with the effects of State policies on religion.

The sociology of the division of religious labor deals particularly with new professional figures and authorities in religions (Gilliat-Ray 2011; Jouanneau and Raison du Cleuziou 2012). Rather than studying religious beliefs and practices for themselves, the point is to analyze and compare one of the outcomes, among others, of social change. This includes covert changes in religious organizations as well as diversification in contemporary societies (Hervieu-Léger 2000, p. 249). The institutionalization of specialized positions and practices, with agents dealing with religion outside of previous roles, is not restricted to varieties of religious transmission and schools (Cappello and Maccelli 1994; Angey 2022). It also occurs in prison and detention center chaplaincies (Becci 2011; Beckford 2013; Darley 2014; Béraud et al. 2016), in the military (Settoul 2017), in hospitals, in nursing homes (Anchisi et al. 2016; Timmins et al. 2022), etc.

1.2. Empirical Data

The empirical data come from my doctoral research in political sociology, led between 2013 and 2017 in Italy, mainly in the two regions of Lazio and Piedmont, on the conflictual institutionalization of IRC as a modernized subject of “religious culture”, still administered by Catholic dioceses. The first part of the research was based on archives from political parties (Christian Democracy, Italian Communist Party, Italian Socialist Party) and some personal archives from pedagogical experts, on press archives, parliamentary debates, and 19 interviews with former political and administrative personnel involved in the conflicts about IRC between the early 1970s and the early 2000s. The second part was a contemporary qualitative inquiry, focused on its “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010), IRC teachers, and their ordinary practices in Italian State schools. The reception of the subject by pupils was not studied, nor were parental strategies in relation to the subject or textbooks’ contents, contrasting with their predominance in research on Religious Education (Jackson 2008; Benadusi et al. 2017). Instead, the purpose of the contemporary qualitative research was to analyze the practices of a professional category of specialists of “religious culture”, trained, hired, and controlled by the Catholic Church and paid by the Italian State. These practices must be contextualized since IRC can be perceived quite diversely as a legitimate school subject or not, sometimes as an option, by parents and students. Such conditions directly impact discursive practices and professional legitimization, whether their official image of professionalism as teachers is openly contested or not. The variation between registers of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999) allows for taking practices of legitimization, verbal and non-verbal, as the main unit of analysis in this study. Rather than a normative assessment of IRC and its contestations, this framework allows for integrating motives, such as “spirituality” and its verbal register, as one part, among others, of discursive practices.

From this perspective, the fieldwork was conceived following the principles of analytic induction (Becker 1998, pp. 263–90). The reiterated qualitative comparison between individual profiles allows for building gradual explanations from shared characteristics on behaviors and social representations. Based on local networks of relations (snowball sampling), I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with teachers (and with three former diocesan administrators as well) about their moral careers (Becker 1963), their religious socialization, and their professional practices as teachers in these inter-institutional spaces (see

Table 1. General profiles of the interviewed IRC teachers at the time of the first interview.

Region	Interviewed Teachers	Gender, Age	Religious Status	Professional Position	Level
Lazio (N = 11)	Nine teachers, two ex-teachers: Rome (three teachers, one ex-teacher), and four other dioceses	Two women, nine men	Ten lay Catholics and one diocesan priest	Two permanent and seven contractual teachers—including two who passed the selective exam without getting tenured	Three in primary schools and eight in secondary schools
		<30: 0 31–40: 2 41–50: 4 51–60: 3 >61: 2
Piedmont (N = 13)	Eleven teachers, two ex-teachers: Turin (nine teachers, two ex-teachers), and two other dioceses	Five women, eight men	Twelve lay Catholics (including two ex-seminarists) and one monk	Eight permanent and three contractual teachers	One in a primary school and twelve in secondary schools
		<30: 0 31–40: 0 41–50: 6 51–60: 4 >61: 3

below). I also negotiated observations of IRC school lessons (6 h with four teachers in two high schools in Piedmont) and of teachers’ training sessions and meetings (one in Lazio and two in Piedmont). In five individual cases, I carried out two interviews and interacted repeatedly with the same teachers over several months. I then coded qualitatively the contents of these interviews and fieldwork notes by relating and contextualizing excerpts, especially on pedagogical practices, descriptions of students and peers, employment issues, eventual political commitments, religious beliefs, and practices of IRC teachers. Although discourse on teaching practices cannot be taken for an “exact picture” of teaching practices, it provides data on representations, legitimization, and professional tensions.

The following part of this article discusses the main constraints related to the modernization of IRC in the late 20th century, along with reforms concerning its workforce and national curricula. The third part presents the research results on the spiritual legitimization in three complementary aspects: as a claim of higher generality, contrasting with the C of IRC (for the adjective Catholic, cattolica); as an expression of personal sincerity from professionals; and as a motive of pedagogical professionalism in teachers’ training.

2. The “Internal Secularization” of IRC and the Avoidance of the Catechetical Stigma

Over the last forty years, IRC has become a professional sector for the Italian State with about 26.000 specialized agents with specific degrees, increasingly less recruited from the clergy, with an official cultural mandate (Pace 1996) and a selective exam for tenure since 2003.1 In its current framework, IRC presents the institutional façade of a “weak” subject (Canta 1999): a non-compulsory status, one hour a week per class in secondary schools, no numerical mark at the end of the schoolyear, and the constraints of legitimization in ways other than traditional religious transmission (Giordan 2016, pp. 210–11). Gradual curricular changes since the 1980s and significant workforce evolutions have been interpreted as contributing to the internal secularization of Catholicism (Isambert 1976). These changes are described below.

First, the register of “spirituality” appears as a secondary, less obvious mark in pedagogic guidelines compared with “religious culture”. Recent curricular revisions have reinforced the components of religions other than Roman Catholicism, while still applying a Catholic institutional lens on the contents (Giorda and Saggioro 2011). The official goal of IRC as a subject, according to the curricula for general high schools, experimented from 2010 and officialized in 2012, is to “contribute to a knowledge of the Christian-Catholic worldview and conception of history, as a source of meaning for the understanding of oneself, of the others and of life” (MIUR 2010a). For example, in this curriculum, the first two years deal with general issues about the Bible, the Hebraic origins of Christianity, and skills described in terms of “moral competences” and “religious language”. The third and the fourth years tackle issues of Catholic ethics and questions of “cultural pluralism”, along with notions about medieval and modern Christendom. The fifth year covers “the role of religion in contemporary society” from the Second Vatican Council to “constructive dialogue based on the principle of religious liberty” (MIUR 2010a).

Second, IRC teachers have been increasingly “laicized” since the 1970s, evolving from about two-thirds of lay Catholics and one-third of clergy among IRC teachers in the 1993–1994 schoolyear to about 90% in 2014–2015 (Battistella et al. 2015, pp. 13–15). Following internal general trends in the teaching profession in Italy, it has become an increasingly feminized professional sector. Indeed, lay Catholic women rose from 45.2% to about 57% over the same period (Battistella et al. 2015, p. 14), although more markedly in Southern and Central Italy, where the component of women, both lay and clerics, represented over 80% of tenured IRC teachers in Abruzzo and Molise in 2009–2010, than in Northern regions (MIUR 2010b, p. 203). The training of IRC teachers has become formalized (mandatory degrees in religious sciences or theology) since the revision of the Concordat. Yet, the permanence of local control is materialized in the diocesan-based certification of the ability (idoneità) to teach (can. 804 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law) on the grounds of pedagogical skills,” correct doctrine”, and “the witness of a Christian life”.

Third, these changes impact the setting for careers in IRC. Among the interviewees, these peculiarities are reflected in the fact that the professional shift to teaching IRC is often a second choice or a reconversion after initial projects of studies and brief working contracts. Overall, 19 out of the 24 interviewed IRC teachers also have a secular academic degree, mostly in literature, history, law, economics, or political science. For most of them, studies in religious sciences in a Catholic diocesan institute were undertaken in parallel, as evening lessons, or after secular studies. Belonging to the Catholic Church is checked at the level of enrollment in religious sciences or theology through recommendation letters for applicants; the practical manifestations can vary according to contexts. Among the interviewees, apart from two cases of adolescent and adult conversions prior to considering teaching IRC, this translates into “traditional” practices such as Sunday practice, Catholic Action movements, scout organizations, and, for secondary religious socialization, a contribution to local or national Catholic periodicals such as Avvenire. In addition, 9 out of 24 mention a previous experience as a catechist or in pastoral responsibilities toward youth, confirming the image of diversified tasks around the prevalence of catechesis, as shown by a quantitative study on profiles of religious sciences students in Veneto in 1998 (Giuliani 2001, pp. 192–94).

In several contests of qualitative inquiry, the issue of religious transmission in terms of beliefs, and anything that could remind students of “catechism”, was portrayed as a negative description by the interviewed IRC teachers. For example, Federico,2 an IRC teacher at a high school in Turin, when asked about the management of IRC by Catechetical offices in many dioceses, reformulated an established legalistic defense, drawing a strict line between catechism and the subject after the revision of the Concordat.

“This ambiguity remains, it is curious, even though over 30 years have passed since the revision of the Concordat, they don’t get it. Many people still think [IRC] is a kind of catechism. And that as such it should be done in parishes and not in schools. Instead, the fact that it has its curricula or its many guidelines… but it didn’t get through to them. They either don’t believe it, or they think it is a move from the Church to sell a catechetical testimony, precisely, in schools. This is nonsense, anyone who enters a school and who knows the curriculum and how teachers work, realizes these are different things.”

(Interview, Turin, March 2017)

This excerpt encapsulates some of the peculiarities of the subject: depending on the enrollment of students formally under the authority of parents for that decision until the age of 14, the “choice” of IRC has to be legitimized by teachers and diocesan staff. However, its credibility as a regular school subject is relative to contexts—classrooms, teacher–parent relations, and reputation.

As a foreign researcher and an outsider to daily teaching relations, my interactions with IRC teachers led them sometimes to use “defensive” arguments in interviews. For example, they would reiterate that IRC was “cultural, not confessional”, and that it was separate from sacraments. However, the discursive register of “spirituality” appeared in other contexts to legitimize the subject diversely from the official legal text. Its uses can be described as ways of framing the interest of IRC, the personal commitment of teachers, and their professionalism by avoiding clerical aspects, often by claiming practical, “fieldwork” experience (Béraud 2007) with youth.

3. Legitimization in the “Spiritual” Register

Practices of legitimization (Lagroye 1985) are concerned with making a typically unequal relationship, including coercion, acceptable to limit situations of vulnerability. They bear relevance in specific contexts and rely on unequally socially available resources—practical knowledge, cultural capital, economic assets…—and competencies. Formal verbal motives do not suffice to account for sociological reasons for action, typically for commitment in a professional career (Mills 1940), but they are part of the social process of labor. In the case of IRC teachers, practices of legitimization that use the register of spirituality show how potential criticism (Boltanski 1990, pp. 61–74) is deflected in pedagogical practices, but also how the role of colleague–teacher can be reappropriated, despite the peculiarities of the position. This does not mean power relations are declining in the administration of IRC. Indeed, according to their resources, dioceses have sometimes adapted their practices and the logic of professional training to the spirit of New Public Management (Ball 2003) in the State educational policy sector (Silhol 2019). “Spirituality” occupies an ambiguous place in this regard.

3.1. The Register of Spirituality in Tension with the Register of Culture

While the register of “religious culture” allows claiming a higher generality than Catholic tradition and internal discourse, the register of “spirituality”, with its lexicon, has appeared in interviews and interactions with IRC teachers when justifying diverse approaches and, importantly, having to preach for the “choice” of IRC by pupils in high schools and professional and technical institutes. Among interviewed IRC teachers, those who resorted to this register were not necessarily the most “laicized” ones, for example, when talking about relations with pupils from religious minorities or about the ethical themes in the curricula in interviews. The issue could rather be explained in situations dealing with unfavorable perceptions of the subject and having to defend it without the possibility of arguing about teaching the “history of religions” or “religious culture” with a notion-centered approach.

Two cases of the verbal use of “spirituality” as a pedagogical justification can be compared in this regard. The first case is characterized by a context of low average enrollment in a high school and a significant presence of Muslim and Protestant minorities among the youth in the area.

Pierluigi, a contractual IRC teacher and a former seminarian in a diocese in Piedmont, was met as one of four IRC teachers in a high school with an important Classics section. Born in the mid-1970s, he came from a working-class background and stated several times in the interview that he did not really grow up as a Catholic. His narrative framed his biographical trajectory as a religious conversion during an Easter mass, after a period of “troubles” in his twenties. He explained having had secondary religious socialization by participating in Neocatechumenal groups and then in a Franciscan community, and that he gave up his training for the priesthood after three years “because I understood the Lord did not call me for it” (Interview, Piedmont, March 2017).

Contrary to many interviewed IRC teachers, Pierluigi argued that he used his knowledge of theology from the seminary, as well as ulterior studies in philosophy at a state university, to circumvent the official IRC curriculum. In his discourse, he used motives about “spirituality” to underline discomfort about the expectations of being a professional in every aspect and about any pretension of erudition, with low numbers of enrolled pupils in attendance. Conversely, he described one of his older IRC colleagues, a tenured teacher, as

“A very, very well-prepared teacher, yet with a broad generational gap with pupils, a rather rigid training in the seminary, and he does quite beautiful things from a didactic point of view: the Church Fathers, papal encyclicals, that are absolutely central on the paper. […] But kids do not expect this from an IRC teacher.”

(Interview, Piedmont, March 2017)

Instead, the discourse of “spirituality” relative to IRC appeared more convincing to him than adapting IRC to the standards of the Classics. Being trained in philosophy and considering a future career in teaching that discipline, the case of Pierluigi represents the typical arguments of religious diversity and culture to a broader picture of the relevance of “spirituality” in a changing Italian society.

“Now, more than ever, we need to give back a spiritual dimension to kids. So that the economy would not become the only idol and the only criterium to interpret reality, what happens with the free market. Thinking that the human being has a spiritual dimension, a quest for meaning, even after the 20th c. […], the claim of God’s death, philosophy, theology, were about religion becoming slowly archeology. Instead, today, there’s a reborn reality, not of institutional religion, but the quest for spirituality, for silence, for meaning. Inside this great confusion of global economy, there’s great research for spirituality. Then, the world is increasingly closer, due to globalization, it puts Italians, Muslims, Orthodox, in close contact with their cultures. In a factory, you can have a colleague that follows Ramadan, doesn’t drink, you see that he suffers during a hot day and doesn’t drink, and you say: “But you’re mad, you don’t drink? If you’re thirsty, you drink.” But if you don’t know, you cannot respect, you cannot talk, and everything gets stupid.”

(Interview, Piedmont, March 2017)

This rhetoric can be compared with how Federico, the abovementioned permanent IRC teacher, dealt with the legitimization of his subject from an opposed perspective but resorting selectively to the register of “spirituality”. While Pierluigi stressed general trends and “spirituality” as a need to justify an adaptative approach, Federico defended a scrupulous adherence to the curriculum, which was more relevant even for such a need in students’ lives. One of the few interviewed teachers with no other academic degree outside religious sciences, he was born in 1960 into a working-class family, and he held for some time a representational position for an autonomous teachers’ union. He added he obtained his own religious education, as a teenager, by taking part in activities and games in the parish, rather than from his family. He asserted repeatedly during the interview that IRC is culturally beneficial and that the Piedmontese context of secularization forced him to cope with declining numbers of enrollment.

“Personally, I accepted losing pupils, since I cannot accept doing entertainment, talking about their problems in such a general, generic way. If I did so, I would prove right who contests the presence of this subject in school. If I must talk about their problems and nothing else. Instead, it makes sense for me to come to school, because I represent a millenarian culture in a country, but a culture that is founded on solid grounds, on a holy text, on a tradition, on the words of the magistery of the Church, not on what I think, on my sensibility. So, in this sense, I have always sought to stay very close to the curriculum. Even too much at times. Because, indeed, kids too need actualizing this religious presence, which includes culture, sensibility, in their daily life, don’t they? So, even here, the balance is not easy to find. Trying to make them understand what a religion is, how it was born, its manifestations, how Christianity was born, which historical sources, and conversely talking about their problems.”

(Interview, Turin, March 2017)

In Federico’s case, the register of “culture” was explicitly preferred, and he was among the few interviewed teachers who refused to tolerate the presence of non-enrolled students in his own IRC lessons, due to a lack of alternatives or in the absence of other teaching staff, a common practice in schools. However, he stressed that the subject should be “universal”; hence, he tolerated talking about “students’ problems”, and their experiences served as a secondary resource. While he did not use the term “spirituality” itself, Federico located the relevance of “religious presence” in daily aspects of students’ lives, in terms that can be legitimized as subjective choice acknowledging some religious pluralism in society (Giordan and Pace 2012).

While variations in asserted religious identity and relations to teachers’ beliefs have been outlined in Catholic schools (Pollefeyt and Bouwens 2010), the case of IRC teachers in officially secular State schools shows how an atypical professional status, compared with other teachers, complexifies the issue of legitimacy in context. These tensions about legitimizing IRC can be further illustrated in the issue of verbalizing personal commitment for teachers, in terms of sincerity, despite the collective constraints of stressing professionalism.

3.2. Testifying Personal Sincerity as Professionals of IRC

The topic of the difficulties in the teaching vocation in Italian schools is far from new. Early studies showed the weight of disappointment in the making of teachers’ careers and personality traits (Barbagli and Dei 1969, pp. 31–45). In the case of IRC teachers, their teaching positions result from the historical transformation of a minor part-time occupation, subordinate to more prestigious operations in the division of religious labor such as preaching, into a specialized category of agents, with career plans and the possibility of full-time positions. This aspect reinforces the constraints to justify oneself as a professional. The recourse to the register of “spirituality” can be interpreted again in relation to the role of the “exemplary” Catholic believer required from the diocesan institution, in that it makes part of competencies, furthered in their secondary socializations, in producing a narrative about one’s trajectory (Le Pape 2015, pp. 121–30).

The potential critical dimension of the register of “spirituality” is stressed regarding traditional notions of authority and hierarchical power (Giordan 2016, pp. 209–10). Yet, the lexicon and the arguments were used, during interviews, by IRC teachers in good relations with their dioceses as well as by others in latent conflict. Compared with the discourse on professional precariousness in IRC, which mainly conveys a critical assessment of their working conditions (Silhol 2019), the register of “spirituality” rather bears relevance in claiming an intimate personal commitment to the job. The comparison of the two profiles can illustrate the argument.

Marco, a contractual IRC teacher at a high school in Turin, was characterized by one of his colleagues as “incredibly appreciated from pupils, who say so ‘because he understands [them]’” (Interview, Turin, September 2016). He was a specialized educator in another region before having burnout, earning a degree in religious sciences, and presenting himself through personal connections in the diocese.

Later in the same schoolyear, I carried out observations of two IRC lessons by Marco on the same day. The first was a “relaxed” teaching situation: a mostly informal talk with pupils in their last high school year, about death and the afterlife, in which one of them was eating a sandwich sitting on the floor without any remark from Marco. The second was a more difficult one, noisy and with scarce attention from about thirty students. In the latter, Marco tried to stress the relevance of Easter in an ordinary life, in front of uninterested kids. He joked that he could lose his job if his words were misinterpreted when he said he would not care about the Easter holiday if he did not believe in the resurrection of Christ (Observation, Turin, March 2017). During an earlier collective interview with his two IRC colleagues in their high school, he admitted being “judged on the basis on his subject”, adding he did not feel the need to “apologize for being here”. Noticeably, the three IRC teachers were involved in popular charity programs within the high school—food banks, coordinating pupils’ volunteering… Thus, he explained:

“[Our perspective] holds together the various dimensions of the person, including the spiritual dimension. The attempt to bring kids to their deepest human dimension, so, what do religions have to say, to make us even humanly deeper. To have more humane relations, with other religions, with other cultures. With the other people in the classroom, what religions tell us to help us be more humane. And I strive somehow in this direction, with all these activities. […] We are properly interested in the complete dimension of kids, that they should not only know to speak with idioms or rules, Italian, French, Spanish, German, but with the language of the heart, the language of mankind…”

(Interview, Turin, September 2016)

Although the other two tenured IRC teachers agreed with Marco’s words, one adding IRC deals with “a universal language” and referring to the Linguistic section of the high school, they admitted to working differently. Both had previous degrees in history from the University of Turin, and their lessons were given in a more top-down pedagogical relationship. Their own self-presentations in interviews were less explicit about their personal faith, although, in their interviews, they mentioned their connections to local curates helped them consider professional reconversion to teach IRC after their studies.

The case of a teacher at a primary school in Lazio, Dario, shows how the same register of “spirituality” consents to articulating personal testimony of faith with criticism of diocesan authority, in the context of an interview at home rather than at school. Born into a working-class family in the mid-1960s, he stated that his interest in teaching IRC came after military conscription and a brief stint as a contractual sports teacher:

“Since I came from the training of the body, I missed the aspect of the mind, so the spiritual. And so, I came closer to this kind of teaching. As there was the possibility to teach as well, I seized it. I was a substitute several times, either in Religious Education or in Sports, then I saw that teaching Religion was even more gratifying. From the perspective of relations, of personal research, also because we work more on the mind than on physical body. Both are important to train the individual, but the spiritual aspect, the mental aspect, gives you a broader, a more variegated perspective.”

(Interview, Lazio, April 2016)

His trajectory had been marred with disappointment, economic difficulties, and hierarchical sanctions in some situations. Although he passed the selective exam in 2005, he was not tenured, due to a lack of positions in his region, and he had remained since then a contractual teacher without statutory advancement. Dario lost union support due to a conflict with a principal in a school, and he chose to move from a confederal union to an autonomous teachers’ union. Regarding his relationship with the Catholic Church, he expressed significant motives of criticism on the topic of precariousness. His wife, also an IRC teacher, was sanctioned for being outspoken about how seminarians and male clergy were privileged in the IRC teaching staff. Eventually, she chose to leave schools altogether to retrain in the police. Consequently, in a common interview, both stressed that IRC had not provided them stability and that it had long prevented them from buying their apartment. As a result, they had avoided their parish for years due to these tensions, before joining a community of the Neocatechumenal Way. Dario added with gravity that “despite the Church, there’s still faith” (Interview, Lazio, April 2016).

These discursive practices of legitimization stress sincerity and the refusal of compromise with one’s values as a professional, aiming to affirm the personal value of IRC in terms of “inspiration” outside of opinion and utilitarian calculation (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999, p. 370). They also incorporate some topics for valuing religious diversity in general terms, independently from uneven organizational statuses and conflicts in the public sphere (Lamine 2004, pp. 207–24). In this regard, the use of the register of “spirituality” to support a claim of sincerity does not seem to characterize stable positions. The interviewed IRC teachers who insisted on curricular contents of “religious culture” were either tenured or had other resources in their careers: additional secular degrees, personal erudition, support and esteem from peers, commitments in schools and/or in the diocese, etc. Conversely, teachers with more unstable or recent positions in schools, such as Marco, or that are left vulnerable by diocesan management, as in Dario’s case, seem mainly to use the professional justifications of “spirituality” differently from how institutional discourse would use it.

3.3. Talking about Religion in Spiritual Terms

Used as a marker to describe the contents of IRC as a school subject, or as a motive to justify personal commitment as a professional, the register of “spirituality” is second to the one of “religious culture”, but it remains a component of the division of labor between diocesan staff and IRC teachers. As Catholic dioceses organize the training sessions of IRC teachers, often in cooperation with authorized pedagogic organizations, mentions and motives related to the register of “spirituality” illustrate its ambiguity as well as its potentially conflictual uses.

The example of a region-wide training session for IRC teachers centered on learning disabilities, held in Turin in March 2017, showed how the diocesan organization addressed the place of “spirituality” in professionalism. This session, titled “IRC teacher/educator: the inclusive School, currentness and perspectives”, was organized in front of a few hundred participants from Piedmont and Val d’Aosta. It was one of several organized over the schoolyear with the support of the diocese and the implication of Catholic pedagogic associations, such as UCIIM for secondary schools and AIMC for primary schools. Two academic speakers in the morning session talked about general didactic issues of learning disabilities such as dyslexia and other situations, partly covered by the 104/1992 Law in Italy. Yet, the topic of inclusion was tackled complementarily by other non-academic staff. The diocesan priest responsible for IRC and pastoral activities in schools introduced the training session, and two IRC teachers intervened to promote a professional textbook they had written. In his opening speech, the diocesan priest used anti-utilitarian motives to justify a distinctive relevance for IRC in dealing with learning disabilities.

“When we talk about inclusion, I smell a model of “efficiency”, to make things work better, to develop skills. I want to be provocative: we can do better than that. The Other, whoever they are, is good.”

(Notes from participant observation, Turin, March 2017)

During the day, the technical considerations on discourse, allusions to ethnic and cultural diversity from an inclusive Catholic perspective, were balanced with PowerPoint presentations and speeches praising projects performed in both “working efficiency” motives and compassionate considerations on dignity. In this regard, “spiritual” notions were secondary to the topic of the training session, but the register was used by presenters in some considerations, and it bore affinities with the non-utilitarian, if top-down, discourse on inherent personal dignity.

The first type of discourse on “working efficiency” was illustrated by a presentation by Salesian educators about their students with Down syndrome in a technical institute, stressing how rigorous and serious the latter were considered in their work placements. As for the second type of frame on shared dignity, a member of an officially non-confessional community welcoming diversely able young people in Piedmont presented a video on their activities with a rock song by Vasco Rossi (“I soliti”). The presentation aimed at eliciting emotions for a discourse on dignity and the worth of authenticity, independently from the labor market. These frames relied on ways of conveying solidarity, compassion, and emotions, detached from power issues (Boltanski 1993, pp. 117–41). Consequently, speakers avoided other frames that would be more common in left-wing education circles such as the issues of access to rights and precariousness in education. Speakers also contributed to individualizing educational issues, since they located the scope of differentiated pedagogy for IRC in relational, interpersonal issues rather than in structural or general parameters.

The institutional ambiguity of the references to authenticity and subjective experiences was found in other instances when dealing with diocesan management. I interviewed four former administrators of IRC who worked with the Italian Episcopal Conference, including two who had responsibilities in the diocesan management of IRC teachers in Rome. During these interviews, some elements related to the topic of the witness of a Christian life were followed by descriptions in terms akin to “spirituality”: authenticity, lived religion, yet in conformity with the principles of Roman Catholicism. In an interview, one of the former administrators of the Catechetical office in the Vicariate of Rome in the 1990s and 2000s,3 tended to assess the quality of IRC teachers in terms of the authenticity of the “culture” that ought to be rooted in lived faith.

“When I noticed people who had their degrees did not attain decent levels of… religious culture, I had done this reflection that, if we have questions, we achieve learning. If there’s no question, we can study, we can refer to how it was dealt with in the moment of studying, we can pass the exams, can’t we? But we manage to get a degree, not to have a culture. And so, people who do not have a lived religious experience (un vissuto religioso), which creates religious questions, unfortunately, […] they cannot teach IRC in a cultural way.”

(Interview, Rome, February 2016)

The case of IRC encapsulates some paradoxes of euphemizing religious authority and renegotiating it in a professional context, and how “spirituality” can be part of such symbolic and practical evolutions. The register of “spirituality” remains less visible, in discourse, than the vocabulary of “religious culture”. Nonetheless, its components, in terms of a subjective reading of lived experiences, recur in the institutional legitimization of IRC as well as in ordinary practices. This discourse relies on continuous efforts of internal rationalization, including what sociologist Jacques Lagroye described as a regime of testimonies on the question of religious “truth” (Lagroye 2006, pp. 167–80). Indeed, the regime of testimonies illustrates how some Catholic individuals understand and justify their religious belonging by referring to the value of personal authenticity, to subjective choice, and to practical witness in the direction of other people, rather than to the doctrinal conformity of their beliefs. In a professional context such as teaching IRC, the register of “spirituality”, with motives of choice and experience, can appear relevant to legitimize a “weak” subject, albeit it is used in potentially contradictory modes.

4. Conclusions

As a register, “spirituality” legitimizes a frequently contested subject such as Catholic Religious Education and its teachers, particularly in situations where the register of “religious culture” appears less relevant, sufficient, or affordable for its agents and its promoters. Arguing about subjective experiences detached from notions of authority, and about sincerity and testimony, even with an institutional Catholic subtext, can use resources from a “spiritual” register, not only for rhetoric strategy. Thus, “spirituality” provides a register of narration and legitimization to IRC teachers and the institutional management of the subject. It presents a consequently ambiguous role. Indeed, it contributes to the way diocesan authorities keep control over IRC (lexicon, training activities), while it can support subordination to the management of a school subject as well as more critical bottom-up stances from teachers. Although the strength of Catholic institutions is differentiated in regional terms, with more secularized areas in Northwestern and Central Italy (Cartocci 2011), primary Catholic socialization is no longer taken for granted in contemporary Italian society, whether in catechism or intrafamilial religious transmission to youth (Garelli 2016). Hence, some of its components are verbalized by such specialists as IRC teachers, to make visible what was previously culturally obvious (Zerubavel 2018, pp. 58–59) in more acceptable ways officially outside of the purpose of religious transmission, but that still rely on the heritage of a symbolic dominance of Catholicism in Italy. These characteristics of the case of IRC should not be thought of as ubiquitous in other cases of religion in the workplace or even of teaching about religions in schools (Béraud and Willaime 2009). However, this analysis of discursive practices shows that some aspects of the relations between “spirituality” and “religion” are rooted in professional problems and power relations, here with diocesan control, legitimacy in schools, and peers’ recognition.