| Summary: | The Renaissance saw the reactivation of the Eucharistic conflict in western and central European Christianity. Facing the Roman church, the protagonists of the magisterial Reformation were far from united and they split apart at the Marburg Colloquy (1529). Insisting on the literal meaning of the words with which Christ instituted the Eucharist – “Hoc est corpus meum” – against Zwingli’s symbolic interpretation, Luther triggered off the process of “confessionalization” of Christianity; one of its functions would be to pronounce doctrinal anathemas against both Christian (Catholic, Protestant, Anabaptist) and non-Christian (Jewish, Muslim) adversaries. The confessional division which appeared in western and central Europe concurred with a territorial and social separation, so that the conflict of interpretation regarding the incorporation of the divine body in the communion service fostered the conflict surrounding the construction of the new political Europe. Though the confessional anathemas of the sixteenth century were abandoned in the twentieth century under the influence of the ecumenical movement, their repercussions are still perceptible today: if Europe’s political borders are no longer religious, religious borders remain, shrouded in the quest for a “differentiated religious consensus”.
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