From the outside, Italy's often depicted as a bastion of Catholic culture and tradition, styled as “the pope's backyard.” While practice of the faith is relatively healthy compared to most of the rest of Western Europe, there are also vast swaths of advanced secularism up and down il bel paese, and a young Italian growing up in that milieu often has no real contact with the Church at all.
One place you often find such youth are at Italy's public universities, and back in the 1980s and '90s, a young Italian priest made a name for himself by bringing large numbers of those thoroughly secularized young people into the faith at Rome's sprawling Tor Vergata University, with a total enrollment north of 30,000.
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