La legittimazione giudiziaria di una confessione religiosa. Il caso Scientology

Abstract

The increasingly widespread popularity of what are known as ‘new religious movements’ in recent decades has fired a series of much-debated questions, perhaps the most urgent of them being whether these movements can be recognised as religious beliefs. By going over the twenty-year history of legal proceedings concerning the Church of Scientology, the article adopts an inevitably comparative approach to investigating the nature of the movement, concluding with a verdict that the judicial legitimation of the Italian Church of Scientology as a religious belief is both possible and desirable, especially in the light of objective criteria established in this field by the Constitutional Court and referred to by the Supreme Court in its recent decision N° 1239, dated 8 October 1997.