Marcello and religion...?

He doesn't reject religion, he practices all the rituals (Church wedding, etc) while not really believing. I don't know about Italy, but from my experience this is not unusual in cities in the Latin Catholic world - people who baptise their kids, have a church wedding, etc but apart from these infrequent occasions are not Catholics in any meaningful sense. That, when Clerici says he doesn't really believe and his wife answers that nobody does, not even the priests, but it's clear she still practices rituals such as the wedding, implies this is a common attitude in his immediate milieu, and thus is a way of conforming.

The Italian Fascist movement had a pretty uneasy relationship with Catholicism, although both supported broadly authoritarian policies and overlapped in some ideological matters. There existed something like a truce between the two in the years of Mussolini's government, he would carry out a few rituals and the Catholic church could operate as long as it didn't interfere in government. The confession seen is very telling - Marcello wants to pay his debt to society, not God or the church, which demands a different moral code ("blood washes blood", the church offers love, rather than strength, which is why many Fascists and National Socialists rejected religion, and some analysts draw parallels with Nietzschean thought). The Fascists were a consciously modern - perhaps romantic - movement that placed man and the fatherland at the centre of it's ideology. He is practising at the end because he wants to conform, simple as that. He has a very abstract, detached relation to being a Fascist too, even if this isn't as explicit.

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