Un choix, une mesure. Controverses sur les statistiques de l’enseignement de la religion catholique en Italie (1986-2016)

Regarded as a service rendered by the Church to schools in the eye of its promoters and a service rendered to the Church by schools in the eye of its critics, Catholic Religious Education in Italy is a case study of the governance of religion in schools. The controversial quantification of the attendance to religious education courses since 1986 underlines the issues of categorization and regulation based on national and local indicators. The framing of students’ enrollment in terms of individual “choices”, related to a rhetoric of a “religious culture” issue, has exerted long-term constraints on the practices of control and evaluation based upon statistics, as well as on debates about the legitimacy of the religious education.