ABSTRACT
The essay/review is inspired by a recent volume written by Carmela Ventrella, entitled “La Corte d’Appello dello Stato della Città del Vaticano. Pluralità di funzioni e vocazione interordinamentale”. Imagined as an indirect dialogue with the author, it analyzes S.C.V. case-law by looking at it as a reversed portrait of the secularization of state legal systems. If compared with the para-mythological narrative of Western juridical secularization, the experience of S.C.V. reveals an almost aberrant phenomenon: the (spontaneous) inclusion of entire sectors of secular law within a religion-based legal system. Actually, the case-law dynamics that accompany this inclusion — and the fact that it took place—embody a sort of cultural confutation of the dualisms banded about by the rhetoric of secularization, namely, reason/faith, law/religion, exterior/interior, public/private etc. More specifically, taking the perspective of the S.C.V. legal experience (rather than that of the secular sta- te) as the background of theoretical analysis, two elements stand out quite clearly. They are, respectively, the incompleteness of modern legal secularization and the permanence within it of a pervasive legal Christian theology that runs even deeper than Schmitt’s political theology. The theoretical implications of these elements for political/legal secularization theory and the dynamics of inter-legality applied to state/religion relationships, if duly taken into account, could be nothing short groundbreaking.