The crystal of secularism

It may seem like a paradox, but the term “secularity” is notoriously taken from religious language, or rather from the language of a particular religion. The Catholic Church, in fact, divides the faithful into two large categories: the clergy and the laity (can. 207). In the ecclesiastical world, it was once said of a priest suspended a divinis that he had been “reduced to the lay state” and we commonly speak of “lay movements”, of “secularology” and of “laity” or of a renewed “vocation of the laity” after the Council. According to this line of thought, the lay person is therefore the non-cleric. The term, which originally had a negative connotation of uncultured, has come to indicate other forms of extraneousness: consequently, we talk about “lay members” of the CSM, to say that they are not magistrates, and Freud used the expression “lay analysis” to designate psychoanalytic therapy conducted by non-doctors. Well, one might think that the "secularism of the laity" - that is, the one that takes into account the Enlightenment - is nothing other than the reversal of an original negative judgment with respect to the worldly sphere, a negative judgment that today, of course, is no longer relevant even in the Church, which, as is well known, limits itself to opposing a "healthy" secularism to "secularist" ideology.