Founder: Massimo Introvigne (b. 1955) Country of origin: Italy
CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, is one of the largest international information and research centres on NRMs. It was established in 1988 through the efforts of Massimo Introvigne (b. 1955), an Italian NRMs scholar. CESNUR’s original aim was to offer a professional association to scholars specialized in NRMs, contemporary esoteric, spiritual, and occult schools, and the new religious consciousness in general. It started as a small group of scholars predominantly active in Southern Europe. The first officers were, in addition to Introvigne himself, Swiss historian Jean-Frangois Mayer, and Italian church historian and Catholic Bishop Giuseppe Casale, who later became Archbishop of Foggia. In 1988, Casale was appointed first president of CESNUR, with Introvigne serving as its managing director, a position he maintains to this day (in 1998, Casale became honorary president, and was replaced as president by Luigi Berzano, a professor of sociology at the University of Turin). Soon, however, the founders were joined by well-known scholars of new religious movements in the English-speaking world, including Eileen Barker and Gordon Melton.
CESNUR’s first international conferences remained largely gatherings of scholars exchanging research news and information among themselves. In the 1990s, however, it became apparent that inaccurate information was being disseminated to the media and the public powers by activists associated with the international Anti-Cult Movement. Some NRMs were also disseminating unreliable or partisan information. CESNUR became more pro-active, and started supplying information beyond the bound-aries of the academic world on a regular basis, opening an office in Turin in 1993 and organizing conferences and seminars for the general public in a variety of countries. In 1996, CESNUR gained official recognition as a public non-profit entity by the Italian authorities, which currently contribute to most of its projects.
In 1996, CESNUR decided to publicly criticize the anti-cult approach to NRMs adopted by some European governments after the Solar Temple suicides and homicides in 1994, 1995 and 1997. In the wake of the controversies originating from the French parliamentary report on cults (1996), conferences were organized at the Sorbonne University on the anti-cult movement (1996), and in Paris on the shortcomings of the brainwashing model (1997). Four well-attended press conferences were also organized in order to criticize the French report, two in Paris (one at the Senate), one in Brussels, and one in Geneva.These moves provoked a strong reaction from the international anti-cult movement and the French government itself, with several ‘anti-CESNUR’ Web sites and pages appearing on the Internet.
Today, CESNUR is a network of independent but related organizations in various countries (in addition to the international body headquartered in Italy, chapters have been legally incorporated in France and Latvia), dedicated to promoting NRMs research, to spreading information, and to exposing the very real problems associated with some movements, while at the same time defending everywhere the principles of religious liberty. Although established in 1988 by scholars who were mostly (but by no means all) Roman Catholic, CESNUR from its very beginning has had boards of directors which have included scholars representing a variety of religious persuasions. It is independent from any Church, denomination or religious movement, and its research is strictly secular although, of course, each director has his or her own opinions on religion, and remains free to express them anywhere he or she wishes.
Massimo Introvigne started collecting books on NRMs and esoteric movements in the 1970s. His collection now includes more than 20,000 volumes, plus complete, or semi-complete, series of more than 200 journals and magazines. While remaining his personal property, this collection is housed at the CESNUR library in Turin, Italy, which has officially been given public library status by the local authorities. Continuously updated and fully indexed on computer (the index is Web-accessible), it is regarded as the largest collection in Europe, and the second in the world, in its field. The library also includes a large collection of books and comics in the field of popular culture and supernatural fiction, a field which is also part of CESNUR’s interests.
CESNUR’s annual conference is the largest world gathering of those active in the field of studies on NRMs. Conferences have been held inter alia at the London School of Economics (1993 and 2001), the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil (1994), the State University of Rome (1995), the University of Montreal (1996), the Free University of Amsterdam (1997), the Industrial Union in Turin (1998), the Bryn Athyn College in Pennsylvania (1999), the University of Latvia in Riga (2000), the University of Utah and Brigham Young University (2002), and the University of Vilnius in Lithuania (2003). Special seminars are also organized periodically on single topics.
Finally, almost every week seminars or lectures are organized in Italy and elsewhere (including, increasingly, Eastern Europe), in order to introduce the basic concepts of a scholarly approach to NRMs to local scholars, students, government officers, professionals, priests, and pastors, as well as the general public. CESNUR co-operates regularly with law enforcement agencies (including the FBI’s Critical Incident Analysis Group and Critical Incidents Response Group, for which CESNUR organized a seminar in 1999 in Virginia), supplying information and offering courses to agents.
CESNUR sponsors a wide range of publications, from the very scholarly to those intended for the general public. Its main project in Italian has been the monumental Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (2001), which was the Italian media’s most reviewed non-fiction work in 2001. A collection of some forty monographs on single NRMs has also been published in Italian, with some of the titles also being translated into English, Spanish and French. The Web site www.cesnur.org welcomes yearly close to one million visitors, and has emerged as one of the main international Web references in its field.
