The One by Whom Scandal Comes

Chapter 7. The Catholic Church and the Modern World

75 CHAPTER 7 The Catholic Church and the Modern World MARIA STELLA BARBERI: You see the Catholic Church as the prototype of Christian testimony. Yet the Church has often been criticized for acting as the guardian of secular law, the institutional sacralization of violence. I’m thinking especially of the Inquisition. RENÉ GIRARD: This reminds me of an Italian friend, an American citizen actually, who used to say that the Church is like a trade union: there’s no point belonging to an affiliate or subsidiary; one must belong to the strongest and oldest organization. MSB: Many people have said something similar. Max Weber, for example, used to say that if you feel a need for religion, there’s no point looking around for something new—just go inside a church. RG: Christians shouldn’t seek to be in step with the thinking of their time. But if they do, they are no more to be blamed for it than non-Christians today. The Christian world has successively been feudal, aristocratic, bourgeois , and, now, democratic. Imagine the burden of responsibility borne by the early Christians, suddenly confronted with Christ’s revelation and the 76 Chapter Seven rupture it caused with an age-old tradition of belief in the efficacy of violence . It is unthinkable that they should have instantly been transformed into people of the twentieth century. True, they committed all sorts of misdeeds; but these could be seen as misdeeds only afterward, thanks to a measure of historical perspective that was denied them in their own day. The behavior of the Church, in other words, is determined to some extent by the possibilities of the age. I recall reading, in an American anthology, a very modern letter written by the Spanish Grand Inquisitor in 1600 or so, taking a hard line against witch-hunts. He saw the necessity of controlling crowd hysteria in the name of the law. The Inquisition thus upheld the cause of jurisprudence in attempting to combat populist excesses. Nowadays we no longer have any need to put the Inquisition on trial; it’s already been done. Nevertheless we ought not forget that in the thirteenth century, at the time of the war against the Albigensians—when the legate of Innocent III said, “Kill them all, God will know his own”—it is because people really believed in heaven that they said such things. They thought that to send the Albigensians to heaven or to hell a little sooner or a little later wouldn’t change anything. In any case they believed that the law should decide, not the crowd. MSB: That’s not politically correct. RG: Not at all. But think of it, making such a fuss over the Inquisition in the twentieth century—an age that experienced Nazism and Communism! The Inquisition has to be put on trial, everyone says. The Inquisition has been tried in the media a hundred thousand times. But Stalin? Much less often. French Stalinists? Not at all. History, I believe, has got to be taken seriously. This business of treating everything as though it were on the same level is possible only if you have lost all awareness of history—and this at just the moment when it has become indispensable. All the sciences are now being historicized, even astrophysics, which is seen to have obeyed the theory of evolution no less faithfully than the others. For my part, I am seeking to show the fundamentally historical nature of religion. We condemn the Inquisition in the name of Christian values. After all, we can’t condemn it in the name of the Mahabharata, which is comprised of a series of alternating murders, rather like the Iliad! The Church and the Modern World 77 That said, the fact that the innocence of certain types of victims can be recognized is extraordinary. This is the power of our world. It is so strong that, instead of suspecting that something totally new is at work, we judge history as though people who lived in the twelfth century should be castigated for not thinking like readers of Le Monde or The New York Times today. In one sense, of course, we are justified in doing so: thanks to the revelation that was given tothem,Christiansoughttohavebeenaheadoftheothers;butinfactwehave all gone forward more or less together. Christians have therefore failed, and so from a historical point of view I think that the Pope is right to ask forgiveness. Conservatives will tell you that...