PierLuigi Zoccatelli, CESNUR, and the “Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy”
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The late scholar’s “crazy idea” was to create an interpretative rather than merely descriptive tool encompassing the entire Italian religious landscape.
May 23, 2025
*A paper presented at the conference “Dialogue as a Choice: In Memory of PierLuigi Zoccatelli,” University of Turin, May 21, 2025.
PierLuigi Zoccatelli moved to Turin in 1998 to work at CESNUR, where he became the deputy director. At that time, CESNUR was located in a shop at 3, Piazza XVIII Dicembre, next to the historic Majerna gun shop, which was established in 1881. A few years later, when the premises became too small for CESNUR, they were sold to Majerna, which realized its long-held dream of expansion. The shop included a loft that served as a temporary residence for PierLuigi, his first “home” in Turin.
Having headquarters in a store had its advantages and disadvantages. At that time, I lived just a few steps away, at the end of Via Bertola, and one of my most vivid memories is the sound of the crash I heard from my home when someone decided to break the large shop window with a single blow. It turned out that this was not an opponent of CESNUR, but merely a vandal.
PierLuigi came to Turin after the Center’s first permanent collaborator, Verónica Roldán, an Argentine sociologist whom I met in 1994 in Brazil during the CESNUR conference in Recife, decided to move to Rome. Her decision was based on both academic and personal reasons: she had found a boyfriend in Rome, who later became her husband.
When he arrived in Turin in 1998, Pier Luigi, whom I had known for years through Alleanza Cattolica, was 33 years old and, strictly speaking, not yet a scholar of new religious movements. However, he was already a nationally and even internationally renowned scholar of esotericism. His writings published before he arrived in Turin focused on esoteric themes, the “return” of Gnosticism, and the New Age. By then, he had already begun and largely completed his primary research on the Catholic symbolist Louis Charbonneau-Lassay and his connections with René Guénon and other esotericists. He dedicated a book, co-authored with Stefano Salzani and published by Arché in Milan in 1996, to these topics.
PierLuigi already had a good understanding of new religious movements outside the esoteric sphere and had participated in several conferences. However, through his daily work at CESNUR and his systematic and diligent study, he became familiar with dozens, if not hundreds, of different groups in just a few years. He remained fascinated and wrote passionately about new religious movements with esoteric elements, such as the Aumist religion of the Mandarom in France and Damanhur. Additionally, he quickly established himself as an excellent expert on religious organizations like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Soka Gakkai, which do not fall within the realm of esotericism.
In 1999, after a year of working at CESNUR, PierLuigi confidently addressed the topic of religious pluralism in Italy and beyond. It was then that he conceived what he called the “crazy idea”—the reference to an old song by Patty Pravo, whom he knew I appreciated as a singer, was not accidental—of creating an encyclopedia of religions present in Italy. The inspiration for this project came from his meeting with the American historian of religions J. Gordon Melton, who had visited CESNUR in Turin for the first time in 1998. Melton had been publishing his extensive “Encyclopedia of American Religions” for twenty years, since 1978, which was so closely associated with his name that it is now titled “Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions.” This monumental work has seen nine editions to catalog all the religions active in the United States and provide brief historical and doctrinal notes on each one, along with addresses and a bibliography.
PierLuigi envisioned a work similar in scope to Melton’s but with longer entries, partly because the number of religions and movements in Italy was presumably smaller than in the United States. However, it was a “crazy idea” because the encyclopedia of religions in Italy was not intended to be an encyclopedia of new religious or esoteric movements in Italy only, a field we knew pretty well.
A comprehensive encyclopedia needed to explore the numerous groups of Italian Protestantism, understand the organization of Islam in Italy, systematically map the Hindu and Buddhist presences, examine the schismatic and marginal currents of Judaism beyond the majority organization, delve into the endless schisms and controversies of the Orthodox world, and consider the peripheries of Catholicism, rich with small but significant realities that had either broken away from or been excluded from the Catholic Church. Moreover, although convinced that Freemasonry was not a religion, PierLuigi also aimed to include a substantial appendix on the Masonic lodges in Italy—parts of dozens of rival obediences—alongside another appendix on organized atheism. As an expert in esotericism, he could not envision an encyclopedia that did not investigate all the ramifications, even the smallest, of organizations with esoteric roots where extreme fragmentation prevails, including the Rosicrucian, Martinist, and Neo-Templar orders.
Initially, I was skeptical about the feasibility of the idea. It was PierLuigi’s persistence that convinced me to agree. A key factor was that he had secured the collaboration of two additional co-authors: Verónica Roldán, who, after relocating to Rome, was better positioned to visit groups in central and southern Italy, and Prefect Nelly Ippolito Macrina, who passed away in 2021. Nelly served as the Head of Affairs for Non-Catholic Religions at the Ministry of the Interior, maintaining contact with all religions and groups seeking recognition from the Ministry. PierLuigi also coordinated the collaboration of two young scholars, Raffaella Di Marzio and Andrea Menegotto, who became increasingly significant to the encyclopedia. For areas he was less familiar with at the time—but later became an expert in—he entrusted the drafting of numerous entries to specialists, such as Tiziana Procesi for Buddhism, who passed away shortly after the publication of the encyclopedia’s first edition.
Gradually, the “crazy idea” became a reality. For a couple of years, we traveled throughout Italy, uncovering many things we hadn’t known about the presence of hundreds of religious and spiritual organizations. I remember lengthy conversations in Rome to grasp the differences between the various Churches of Christ—instrumental, non-instrumental (referring to the use or non-use of musical instruments in celebrations), and “non-institutional”—which originated in the 19th-century American revival known as the Restoration Movement. Our extensive explorations in Rome, Lombardy, Campania, and Sicily helped us understand the divisions within the great Italian Pentecostal movement and their organizational and theological roots.
In recent months, there has been considerable discussion about a fundamentalist Christian movement that prefers not to have a name but is known as the Two-by-Twos, because its missionaries travel the world in pairs. This movement has operated with significant discretion, and some might even describe it as secretive, since the early 20th century. It was “discovered” due to cases of sexual abuse, and we often read in many newspapers that “no one knew about them.” This statement is not entirely accurate because PierLuigi Zoccatelli was aware of them, had interviewed some of their representatives, and had compiled a precise profile for the encyclopedia. When the recent scandals emerged, I translated it into English and published it as an article by PierLuigi, as it remains a valuable summary for an international audience.
I did the same thing—translated it into English and arranged for posthumous publication—for the entry that PierLuigi dedicated, after several trips around Italy and extensive correspondence with various foreign organizations, to the Universal Great Brotherhood, a group that does not define itself as religious but rather philosophical, yet has a well-defined spirituality founded by Serge Raynaud de la Ferrière in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1948. As often happens, after Raynaud died in 1962, the Fraternity fragmented into dozens of rival organizations, an archipelago that no outside observer had ventured into or managed to bring order to before Zoccatelli. Later, the work of Peruvian scholar Rita Santillan, who was teaching in Vancouver, would delve into the subject in greater depth.
A parallel and equally complex task that PierLuigi executed with great skill was reconstructing the numerous schisms within the Gnostic Movement founded by the Colombian master Samael Aun Weor: hundreds worldwide, including a good dozen in Italy. However, there we were dealing with esotericism and groups practicing sacred eroticism (once called, with a less politically correct term, “sexual magic”), a field of study that PierLuigi had nurtured even before arriving in Turin.
Perhaps the most intricate labyrinth that PierLuigi managed to navigate was that of the groups emerging from the teachings of Baba Bedi XVI, an Indian master of Sikh origin who garnered the most significant number of disciples in Italy after relocating there in 1972. Many Italians recognize his son, actor Kabir Bedi, who portrayed the Malaysian pirate Sandokan in a famous 1976 television series based on novels written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Emilio Salgari. However, equally significant for the history of Eastern spirituality in Italy is his father, Baba Bedi XVI, who passed away in 1993. His death also heralded the typical onset of schisms and independent centers. A map of them did not exist before PierLuigi undertook the task of creating one.
We could go through all the sections of the encyclopedia—which had three print editions in 2001, 2006, and 2013, the last of which was over 1,200 pages long, and then continued to be updated in an online version until PierLuigi died in 2024—and in each one find his imprint and, so to speak, hear the voice of the late scholar, without detracting from the importance of the contributions of the other co-authors and collaborators. However, I can say that without PierLuigi Zoccatelli, there would have been no CESNUR encyclopedia of religions. The original idea was his, and most of the sections would not have been completed without his commitment and dedication.
The first edition of the encyclopedia, published in 2001, introduced itself to readers as the realization of a completely new project in the field of religious studies in Italy. It was one of that year’s most reviewed non-fiction works, garnering attention from daily newspapers and the general media. Journalists were astonished to discover that there were not just a dozen religions in Italy, but hundreds. The encyclopedia also provided—and continued to provide through 2024—statistics compiled by PierLuigi, which became an authoritative and indispensable reference point for scholars and journalists.
Thinking as a sociologist rather than merely as a friend of PierLuigi, the question arises about the significance of publishing repeated editions of the encyclopedia in Italy, initially in print and then online, over a span of twenty-three years. I recall that PierLuigi was very clear about what the encyclopedia should “not” be: a sort of yellow pages of religions, without any attempt to interpret the data.
In response to his concern, I mentioned to him an experience from high school that left a lasting impression on me. At that time, I attended meetings of Alleanza Cattolica at its first headquarters in Turin, located in a semi-underground room of the historic Villa Frassati in the Crocetta neighborhood. A brilliant Italian scholar, who was not a member of Alleanza Cattolica but held it in high regard, was invited to speak at one of these meetings. His name was Emanuele Samek Lodovici. He passed away in 1981 before the age of forty. The theme of the meeting was the notion of the encyclopedia.
Samek distinguished between the Enlightenment notion of the encyclopedia as a collection of concepts that has limited usefulness and lacks educational value for readers, and the original concept before the Enlightenment of “enkyklios paideia,” a Greek term signifying the ordering of knowledge through comprehensive education—a circular journey; according to others, the etymology also refers to “singing in chorus”—to reach a center that is ultimately spiritual. Although the term “encyclopedia” only emerged in the 16th century, encyclopedias existed before that. An author as unimpeachably secular as Umberto Eco—who, I can reveal, was interested in our encyclopedia and requested a copy with a dedication—wrote that “The establishment of an archive of human knowledge and learning took shape in the Roman world, to organize Greek and Latin culture systematically. In the Middle Ages, the encyclopedic model was reinvented allegorically and symbolically. The order of the world, which God heads, descends to the lowest forms of existence, which deserve to be inventoried precisely because they belong to the divine plan.”
The most significant impact of CESNUR’s encyclopedia of religions was to dispel two opposing myths that had spread among journalists and even won over some scholars.
The first myth was that of secularization and the irreversible decline of religion and spirituality. In 1966, anthropologist Anthony Wallace stated that “the evolutionary future of religion is extinction.” The first edition of the encyclopedia opened with a discussion of the positions of the American Protestant theologian Harvey Cox, who, among other things, had learned about our project in Italy and encouraged it. Although Cox initially expressed pessimism about the future of religion, he eventually changed his mind.
In 1994, discussing his 1965 book “The Secular City” and somewhat repudiating it, Cox wrote: “Perhaps I was too young and impressionable when the scholars made these sobering projections. In any case, I had swallowed them all too easily and had tried to think about what their theological consequences might be. But it had now become clear that the predictions themselves had been wrong… They allowed that faith might well survive as a valued heirloom, perhaps in ethnic enclaves or family customs, but insisted that religion’s days as a shaper of culture and history were over. This did not happen. On the contrary, before the academic forecasters could even begin to draw their pensions, a religious renaissance of sorts is under way all over the globe” (Fire from Heaven, 1994, xvi).
However, PierLuigi and I were friends with scholars like Karel Dobbelaere, who vigorously defended the secularization thesis before passing away in 2024. The encyclopedia focused exclusively on organized groups rather than individual beliefs. Nevertheless, in light of the teachings of a close friend and inspiration for the encyclopedia, Luigi Berzano, we recognized the existence of different notions of secularization in the text. Dobbelaere himself discussed macro-, meso-, and micro-secularization.
We had no doubts about the existence of macro-secularization, which for Dobbelaere was the drastic reduction of religion’s influence on the political and moral choices of the majority. However, we noted that this phenomenon did not manifest in the same way everywhere. We favored Eisenstadt’s notion of “multiple modernities” over the idea that modernity had unambiguous consequences.
We took note, again in dialogue about Italy with the work of two sociologists with whom PierLuigi had collaborated for years in Turin, Luigi Berzano and Franco Garelli, that what Dobbelaere called meso-secularization was also taking place, i.e., a decrease in attendance at religious rites such as the Catholic Mass, again not universal in geography and not linear in history. This decline involved traditional religions more than those of recent origin and new religious movements. However, the latter were also affected by COVID and the difficult post-COVID recovery. COVID has changed all the statistics, a topic that fascinated PierLuigi, but which he had only begun to study.
However, we disputed the existence of micro-secularization, the third part of Dobbelaere’s tripartite division; that is, a general decline in interest in spiritual and religious issues that would justify the gloomy predictions about the extinction of religion. This decline did not occur. While the “great” traditional religions were losing ground in terms of the number of regular practitioners—but not, as Berzano recently explained, in terms of participants in rites of passage, nor even in terms of public attention to some of their activities, as spectacularly demonstrated by this month’s conclave—interest in religion and spirituality continued to manifest in a myriad of new, sometimes surprising, and unexpected forms.
Here, however, we must be cautious not to fall into the second myth, which the introduction to the encyclopedia’s first edition warned against in 2001. Faced with the proliferation of hundreds of religious and spiritual organizations listed in the encyclopedia, some might suggest that what the media occasionally “discovers” and calls an “invasion of cults” is indeed happening in Italy. Anyone who knows CESNUR even superficially is aware that we do not use the term “cult”; we reject the distinction between “bad cults” and “good religions.” We uphold freedom of religion or belief, even for groups commonly labeled as “cults.” It goes without saying—but sometimes it’s worth reiterating the obvious—that religious freedom cannot be invoked when crimes are committed; “common” crimes, however, differ from the imaginary crime of “being a cult.”
The encyclopedia has documented that there is no “invasion of cults” in Italy. Even with a broad notion of “new religious movements” or “new religions,” which includes those that emerged in the 19th century, the total number of their adherents in Italy does not reach one percent. There is no “invasion of cults,” but rather, considering the large number of groups described in the encyclopedia, many of which have fewer than a thousand or even fewer than a hundred members in Italy, there is an “invasion of names.”
However, it should be noted that one percent does not represent the number of Italians belonging to religious minorities in general, i.e., religions other than Catholicism. Many of these are not “new religious movements” or “new religions.” They include Islam, Judaism, Protestantism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This percentage, which refers to Italian citizens with Italian passports and thus excludes immigrants in the country who are not citizens, was set by PierLuigi in 2024, shortly before his death, at 4.3%. The two largest groups were Orthodox Christians and Muslims, who in recent years have overtaken Jehovah’s Witnesses. This shift occurred not due to conversions by Italians but rather to immigrants acquiring Italian citizenship.
Religious minorities are thus a notable presence—over four percent—but still not comparable to the figure for the Catholic Church. However, for the latter, a distinction must be made, to quote the title of a 2006 book co-authored by PierLuigi and Luigi Berzano, between identity and identification, between those who feel and declare themselves Catholic (and participate in rites of passage) and the much smaller number of regular Sunday Mass attendees.
Beyond the numbers, religious pluralism remains a significant cultural and political reality. For politics, universities, and mainstream churches and religions, engaging with this pluralism means, first and foremost, understanding it in its actual characteristics and dimensions, beyond the myths. This was PierLuigi Zoccatelli’s intention for the encyclopedia, and it has successfully achieved that goal. It was a great adventure for all of us involved. For PierLuigi, who loved “Moby Dick” and often quoted from it, the encyclopedia represented his hunt for the White Whale. As readers of Melville know, it is an adventure where the hunt is more important than the whale—and one where, unlike Captain Ahab, PierLuigi ultimately brought the ship into port, benefiting the sailors and those who waited anxiously for them on the quay.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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