Dal diritto ecclesiastico coloniale al diritto ecclesiastico interculturale? A margine di un recente studio sul diritto ecclesiastico coloniale italiano.

The essay critically examines Italian colonial ecclesiastical law, starting from a recent volume by Andrea Miccichè, and highlights its pragmatic, differential, and hierarchical nature—designed to manage religious pluralism in colonial territories. This legal system did not aim to universalize principles, but rather to organize religious differences according to logics of imperial control, transforming recognized confessions into legal instruments functional to political domination. The author proposes interpreting this experience through the concept of legal-cultural zones, discontinuous normative spaces that can still be observed today within the so-called empirical empires (USA, China, Russia, Turkey). In this global context, religion continues to serve as a field of symbolic selection, conditional inclusion, and instrumental differentiation. In opposition, intercultural law emerges as a critical and dialogical paradigm, capable of enhancing personal identity and proposing a generative, non-neutralizing form of secularism—faithful to democratic values and open to the complexity of contemporary pluralism.