Rome, May 10.-13. 2026
From 10 to 13 May 2026, the ACRONYM project team participated in the international MIMEC 2026 Conference in Rome, hosted by the Rome Center of Loyola University Chicago. The conference addressed current migration challenges in the context of changing global conditions, increasingly restrictive border regimes, and environmental shifts.
François Gemenne, Anneliese Depoux and Katarína Cséfalvayová participated in the joint panel “Faith, Deservingness & Polarization”, presenting three interconnected perspectives on Catholic attitudes towards migration and the role of the Catholic Church in an increasingly polarised public debate.
In his presentation “Fragmented Moral Authority: Researching Catholic Clergy and Migration in Contentious Europe”, François Gemenne presented research on Catholic clergy attitudes towards migration. Anneliese Depoux focused on generational differences among lay Catholics in France and Italy in her presentation “Generational Habitus and Moral Economies: Lay Catholic Attitudes Toward Migration in France and Italy”.
Representing the Institute for Central Europe, Katarína Cséfalvayová presented “Counter-Narratives under Pressure: Catholic Initiatives, Media Visibility, and the Politics of Migration”. The presentation drew on several strands of research conducted within ACRONYM, including a survey of 300 clergy members in Slovakia, a nationally representative survey of the Slovak population, and focus groups conducted in France, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
The findings point to an intriguing paradox. Catholic organisations are among the actors actively involved in providing practical assistance to migrants and refugees across Europe. Yet these experiences of solidarity are far less visible in public debate than narratives centred on fear, threat and polarisation. ACRONYM research therefore explores the concept of a “visibility gap”, capturing the distance between the practical engagement of Catholic actors and the extent to which this engagement enters broader public narratives about migration.
The joint panel also demonstrated that Catholic attitudes towards migration cannot be understood as uniform. The findings reveal differences between clergy and the wider public, across generations and national contexts, while also highlighting the importance of migrants’ perceived cultural and religious proximity. The presentations generated a lively discussion and numerous questions, providing an opportunity to confront ACRONYM findings with the experiences and research of scholars working in other European contexts.
