Volunteering and Catholicism in Europe. The Inside Perspective. Part 1: Theoretical

The paper analyses the social activity practices of the Catholic persons, as a set of individual and collective action emerging from the Catholic identity and structuralised under the Church-related formal non-profit initiatives. The purpose of the study is to clarify: (1) to what extent the Catholic unpaid social activities of different kinds could be classified as forms of volunteering and (2) to what extent the third sector definitions of volunteering include the specificity of Catholic activities. There are three reasons for observed tendencies to not include religion-oriented volunteering in voluntary studies. Firstly, while using tools for collecting data adequate for the secular world, researchers face methodological difficulties in order to successfully cover social activities organized in parishes and congregations. Secondly, fonist approach reflects the ideological-rooted tendency to treat religion as a matter pertaining to private life. Thirdly, some of religious-based entities tends to keep social activities of the believers inside the church-related circle. From the Catholic perspective, volunteer engagement represents an important aspect of faith-based daily activities, so called ‘lived religion’. Social engagement of believers provided within the church-related entities, as well as outside them, usually fulfils all the main features of volunteering. The relation between volunteering and religion is to be referred, not only to the general position of faith-based and religious organizations in public sphere, but also to the embeddedness of religious life in the society, as in fact, both religion and volunteering are categories social per se. Reflection on volunteering and Catholicism is illustrated by presenting empirical evidence from the 2018 panel expert research among representatives of 29 Catholic Bishops Conferences across Europe.