For several decades now, our country has become more and more fully multicultural and highly religiously pluralistic. Contributing to this have been, on the one hand, substantial migratory flows, mostly from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, and, on the other hand, Italy’s natural placement in the heart of the European political space open to the free exchange of goods and skills. The pluralization of Italian society, the increasingly structural diversification of religious and cultural mores-although with a significant hold on the traditional majority rooting in a religious Catholicism, if not more often cultural or anagraphic-, the contemporary, and in other ways growing, presence of avowedly atheistic thoughts and identities, imposes on public institutions and social actors the ability to be able to interpret and respond to new needs and instances, the outcome of different, sometimes unprecedented, value approaches.

Multiple indicators tell us, however, that our institutional and social workers as a whole have not yet acquired a sufficient level of hermeneutic skills useful for interpreting the new (but also old) needs and rights being claimed in our society. Not infrequently, in institutional settings such as schools, hospitals, or prisons, not to mention sometimes even qualified ministerial bureaucracies, there are delays, misunderstandings, and reluctance to act on requests and sensitivities cultural backgrounds of a heterogeneous and plural user base, so as to suggest that a not insignificant part of our educational, health and ultimately political/administrative system still considers our country to be essentially monoreligious and monocultural, even though it is surrounded-perhaps even besieged-by a religious dust of indistinct matrix, consistency and importance.

The Master’s degree aims to offer a valuable training contribution to the audience of practitioners who more frequently, in their role of public utility, need to respond professionally to the instances of a conscientious, religious and cultural nature that an increasingly heterogeneous audience invokes, especially in the most qualified and delicate areas of existence. In fact, only the full recognition of the person, in his or her intimate, peculiar, religious and cultural coordinates, makes it possible to respond accurately to demands that often invest, life, health, the multiple needs of worship, family, school, and body.