„Cele două apostolate”: biserica, medicina ştiinţifică şi procesul secularizării societale în România interbelică
“The Two Apostolates”: Religion, Scientific Medicine and the Process of Societal Secularization During the Romanian Interbellum Period

Summary/Abstract: In the context of a secularized society, Scientific Medicine and Religion belong to two completely different discursive orders, yielding dual competing worldviews. In such a societal arrangement, the medical enterprise would never appeal to religion in order to institutionalize its arguments and practices. Biomedicine belongs to an ordained, cognoscible, predictable and manipulable physical world, while the religious sphere is utterly denounced as a transcendent domain, in which naivety and superstition reign. Starting off by describing a curious case during the Romanian interbellum period, in which a renowned medical doctor, a scientific authority par excellance, tries to establish a systematic collaboration with the clergy in order to implement modern medical regulations, this paper aims to confront two distinct socioanthropological perspectives on the secularization process. I strongly believe that this specific occurrence gives us the opportunity to relaunch the debate upon the opposing modes of approaching secularization. Does the functional differentiation between the religious and the secular constitute a necessary by-product of the modernization process or a strategic category used in larger biopolitical schemata?

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