From the 4th century to the present, civil power and religious power have done nothing but fight each other to wear each other's robes, when they have not agreed, allying themselves, to both fit into the same, single robe.

«There is no secularism either when religion, singular or plural, meddles in the affairs of the state, making the state an affair of religion, or when the state meddles in the affairs of religion, making religion an affair of the state. Secularity means prohibition of meddling, whatever its content, it being irrelevant whether hostile or benevolent».

The book is an attempt to answer the question of how – that is, on the basis of what ‘self-understanding’ and conception of its duty – the Catholic Church defends its position as a universal authority, even after freedom of conscience has established itself and, with it, societies have adopted the Enlightenment principle of tolerance and have thus taken on a pluralistic configuration. Why is it that in pluralistic societies the Catholic Church has not been ‘reduced’ to being one religious association among many others, certainly the most extensive, the strongest and the richest, but still an association that organizes and addresses itself to only one part of society? In short: how can it continue to be ‘catholic’, once it has recognized ethical and confessional pluralism, not only as a de facto condition, but as a de iure condition?

«Gustavo Zagrebelsky grasps the tangle of the complicated skein that is the political return of religion, in which the crisis of the democratic state, the emergence of a widespread indifference to religion, but at the same time also the search for a soul supplement for an increasingly broken, irrational, unstable politics are intertwined.» Carlo Galli, la Repubblica