The Challenge of Otherness: Differences and Analogies between Systems of Multireligious Presence in Europe

AbstractOne of the most important experience made by the Roman Catholic Church in the 20th Century concerns the meaning of “the other”. Since the Middle Ages one of the defining point of the Christianitas was its difference in comparison to the other which was by definition an enemy. The Muslim, the Jew, and mostly the Heretic were paradigms of an unremedied distance between the sphere of salvation and the sphere of damnation: the role of the law was exactly that of identifying at whatever price the other and expel him from the Christian body