SACRED. - From the ancient Latin sakros, later sacer, from sancire, by religion or by law, it is that which is held to be inviolable and therefore forbidden to profane use. This prohibition may depend on a sacral motive that is unwritten but handed down by tradition within the social group, which cannot violate it without harm.
The sacred is ambivalent, in that it can harm anyone who approaches it without the due purificatory precautions that must be used every time the sacred and the profane meet; whereas it is a source of well-being for anyone who presents himself to it in a condition of holiness, either because he himself is invested with it (king, priest) or because he has prepared himself for it with the prescribed purifications. The episode of Uzzah is well known from the Bible (2 Sam. 6:6-8), who fell lifeless for having steadied with his hand the holy Ark as it tottered because of a false step by the oxen that were drawing it. It is likewise well known from catechetical teaching that whoever approaches to receive a sacrament of the living without being in a state of grace receives spiritual death from it rather than an increase of life.
Holy, on the other hand, is that which is recognized as such following a sanction by the group or by those who represent it. In ancient Rome, the tribune of the plebs enjoyed a sacrosanct authority, because the sacredness, that is the inviolability, of his person was guaranteed to him by the collective oath sworn by the plebs in his favor, and the holiness was a consequence of the official recognition that the State, however reluctantly, had to grant him. That this recognition took a religious form is deduced from Livy (III, 55), who, after narrating the end of the decemvirate, states that the new tribunes were confirmed with religious ceremonies: «quum religione inviolatos eos, tum lege etiam fecerunt».
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Nicola Turchi