The great nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic political thinker, Juan Donosco Cortes, addressing the issue of capital punishment in his Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, writes:
Governments seem to be endowed with an unerring instinct that teaches them that they can only be just or strong in the name of God. Thus it happens that whenever they commence to secularize, that is to say, to separate themselves from God, they always begin to relax the severity of penalties, as if conscious that their right was weakened. The loose modern theories regarding criminal law are contemporaneous with the decadence of religion, and they have prevailed in the code whenever the complete secularization of political power was established....
"Those who have made the world believe that this earth can be converted into a paradise, have not more readily made it believe it ought to be a paradise where blood is never shed. The end is not in the illusion, but in the very day and hour that this fallacy is everywhere accepted: blood will then gush from the rocks, and the earth will become a hell. Man cannot aspire to an impossible felicity in this obscure valley of our dark pilgrimage without losing the little happiness he already possesses."
This weekend we celebrate the Forty Hours Devotion, and you would expect me to write on that topic. The homilies for the day, however, I deem sufficient matter for your reflection on the most Holy Eucharist, though there can never be enough said about this magnum mysterium since it concerns the prolongation of the very incarnation of the Son of God, yet in a manner more abstruse than the incarnation itself since, for just one point, in the Holy Sacrament the Lord is bodily present in many places all at once, something beyond what He did when He walked in Palestine.
René Noël Théophile Girard (December 25, 1923 – November 4, 2015) was a French Catholic historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He authored nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Among his most basic ideas, which he developed throughout his career and provided the foundation for his thinking, was his view that desire is mimetic (i.e., imitative - all of our desires are 'borrowed' from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic rivalry, that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and one role of religion has been to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
