Katz - Pink Slip the NYT

Here is a perfect example of the veracity of Jon Katz's dictum: "If cultural anthropologists could write, a lot of journalists would have to find other work. And if journalists were given the time, education, and training anthropologists receive, we might better grasp some of the complicated problems we face."

For students of Girard, the text of Father Raniero Cantalamessa's homily highly featured - and inexcusably torn out of context - by the NYT. He is an extremely astute and knowledgeable homilist who utilizes mimetic theory as an instrument of the magisterium of the Church. From his homily:

In 1972 a famous French thinker launched the thesis according to which "violence is the heart and secret spirit of the sacred."[2] In fact, at the origin and center of every religion there is sacrifice, and sacrifice entails destruction and death. The newspaper "Le Monde" greeted the affirmation, saying that it made of that year "a year to mark with an asterisk in the annals of humanity." However, before this date, that scholar had come close again to Christianity and at Easter of 1959 he made public his "conversion," declaring himself a believer and returning to the Church.

This enabled him not to pause, in his subsequent studies, on the analysis of the mechanism of violence, but to point out also how to come out of it. Many, unfortunately, continue to quote René Girard as the one who denounced the alliance between the sacred and violence, but they do not speak of the Girard who pointed out in the paschal mystery of Christ the total and definitive break of such an alliance. According to him, Jesus unmasks and breaks the mechanism of the scapegoat that makes violence sacred, making himself, the victim of all violence...

Read it all here. Then ask yourself: How on earth could the NYT have written the above story and so idiotically misconstrued Fr Cantalamessa? How can anyone believe the New York Times is NOT scapegoating the Catholic Church, given these facts?

Ultimately one must ask oneself: Who are you going to trust? I've made my decision. But I,for one, would not want to be in the shoes of those who so glibly cast doubt into the hearts of those who need Christ's holy Church for salvation.