Tag: René Girard

“Paroxysm,” Iván Gardea, etching, Cuernavaca, 2019

The monstrosity of religion On an ongoing modern debate

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

This week I was invited to the presentation in Cuernavaca of a book that contains a failed conversation between John Milbank, a British Anglican theologian, and Slavo Žižek, a Slovenian atheist philosopher, about the monstrosity of Christ (The monstrosity of Christ: paradox or dialectic?). The Spanish translation was published by the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, at the initiative of Ángel Méndez Montoya, as part of an innovative publishing program to offer readers in Mexico and the Spanish-speaking world current theological debates surrounding God as an ontological problem, as a source of ethical meaning in a modern civilization shaken to its foundations, and as a political problem.

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Before attending the presentation at the Miguel Salinas Gallery Library of the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, located in the historic center of the city in an old house restored as a cultural center, I had the fortune of talking with the Juarez artist Iván Gardea, when visiting his exhibition at the Borda Garden which is open to the public until the end of September.

Maestro Gardea, in addition to being an impressive engraver in the most rigorous Mexican tradition of printmaking that dates back to Posadas and the Taller de Gráfica Colectiva a century ago, is a born thinker, well-versed in literature, music, philosophy, and theology. We met in his studio six years ago to prepare for the exhibition of his series of prints on violence inspired by the thought of René Girard. We held this exhibition at the Andrea Pozzo Gallery of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City in 2019, on the occasion of the international conference "Resist! Violence, Resistance, and Spiritualities," organized jointly by the Jesuit university and the International Journal of Theology Concilium, where I had the opportunity to serve on the board of directors and editorial board for eight years.

During our conversation in the bright colonial courtyard of the Jardín Borda, Iván told me stories about his ongoing artwork, a series of prints specifically about the monstrosity of the sacred in today's society, lost between Western liberalism, "devoid of any belief," and the materialistic atheisms that abound in both academic and social circles. In Iván's opinion, although I correctly interpret it, this monstrosity has many facets, among them nihilism as a way of life without hope. I was greatly surprised to hear his reflections, since that same afternoon we were to discuss the "monstrosity" of Christ in the Žižek-Milbank debate.

So I briefly summarized the ideas I would later express regarding that book, alternating with my beloved colleagues Sylvia Marcos, a renowned gender anthropologist in Mesoamerica who met Žižek in Slovenia; Ángel Méndez, a queer theologian who worked on his doctoral thesis on the theology of food under Milbank's supervision; and Nicolás Panotto, an Argentine Protestant theologian with whom I share projects in the "Theology After Gaza" group convened two years ago by Mitri Raheb to rethink political theology.

In the cloister of the Borda Garden, I commented to Iván that, in my opinion, the monstrosity that was important to discern today was that of the religion that perverts the sacred, expressed as Jewish and Christian Zionism, associated with far-right movements around the world that, in the name of God, not only pervert the Bible in their theology of election and promise, but also incite genocidal violence by manipulating the religious sentiment of entire communities. Another example is the case of televangelist Paula White in the White House advising Trump, his vice president Vince, and Secretary of State Rubio in a crusade to bring their country "back to Christian values."

Another emblematic example of the monstrosity of religion within religious institutions are the criminal cases of manipulation of religion by corrupt leaders, creating financial empires based on boundless ambition and controlling the dormant masses. This phenomenon has produced corruption among political, social, and religious elites in various parts of the world, accompanied by sexual and spiritual abuse, and the trafficking of political and financial privileges by perverse religious figures such as Marcial Maciel and Naasón García in Mexico, Fernando Karadima in Chile, and the leaders of the Sodalicio in Peru.

This monstrosity of religion is what matters most to analyze from a critical perspective in order to contribute to dismantling its power networks in society. It is urgent to do so through investigative journalism like that of Emiliano Ruiz Parra (Emiliano Ruiz Parra: HBO series, massive vehicle for the demystification of Marcial Maciel), of truth commissions such as the one proposed by then-candidate Borič in Chile (which, incidentally, was never implemented), to ensure accountability to society as an obligation of the secular state and, above all, to guarantee restorative justice for victims.

Ivan called these religious groups of today a parody of religion and, at the same time, another version of modernity that is collapsing in our times.

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Inspired by this fascinating conversation, I decided to share my thoughts at the book launch at the event organized by the UAEM School of Psychology, in conjunction with the Jean Robert and Sylvia Marcos Double Legacy Chair. I summarize what I presented at that discussion.

The first thing was to underline the importance of approaching the book as a theological provocation from our Latin American and Caribbean context, so that it is possible to make a critical reading of the European authors of the book, closely following their argumentation and highlighting other intercultural perspectives of approaching the mysterion of the real that religions call God.

Then, it is worth remembering that the meaning of Christ for humanity in times of civilizational collapse that we are experiencing today seems an irrelevant issue in the face of the exponential increase in violence under a new figure that some call, following René Girard, the "escalation to the extremes of the annihilation of the other." It does not seem relevant to discuss a religious figure who was trapped by a religion that domesticated his universal love. It seems even less important to get lost in the debate between a Slovenian philosopher and a British theologian when we find ourselves in the midst of the desolation of wars of genocide in Gaza, of extermination in Congo and South Sudan, of forced disappearances in Mexico, where the urgent thing is to stop the spiral of hatred if we wish to speak of the ethos political and spiritual possible for humanity in this uncertain hour.

And it is precisely here that the question of the experience of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century CE, facing hatred in his own body, may be relevant to us today.

Academic debates often stray into the realm of ideas, no matter how grounded they may be. Defending or accusing Hegel of various solutions to the dialectic of history to justify theological materialism, as Žižek does, or promoting Milbank's radical orthodoxy as a guardian of the City of God, seem secondary when it comes to confronting another monstrosity, one that has many heads, like the one of hatred and death produced by the capitalist, patriarchal, and white, Western hegemonic hydra.

Even defending or accusing Meister Eckhart - or better yet the former Dominican friar Rainer Schürmann (The Principle of Anarchy: Heidegger and the Question of Action), one of its modern interpreters, often cited by Žižek, for his interpretation of the negativity of divine being as the antecedent of the moment of negativity of the Hegelian dialectic seems like straw when the priority is to think about the negativity of those who inhabit “the region of non-being,” as Fanon said, and are being reduced to nothing.

I then proposed a decolonial approach to the book The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or DialecticA scholarly book that will generate much ink in the academic world, whether to validate Žižek's theological agnosticism or to confirm Milbank's theological philosophy. The crucial question the book poses lies in the impasse of reason in the face of the mystery of being. However, what is worth exploring is a different ontological approach, one that conceives of "being that ages and dies," as Levinas said.

To do so, it is necessary to turn to the Bible as the original source of this understanding of the paradox of being, and then to apophatic philosophy to spell out the intelligibility of the absurd when Christianity announces a "crucified Messiah" as the meaning of history. Following this route, it will be possible to cross the abyss to think about the monstrosity of being, but as the radiance of the messianic moment in which history seems to open like a recess of "hope against all hope" through "the wounds that heal."

Thus, another way of speaking about the critical link between philosophy, theology and politics emerges, not as an idea or as potestas politics, but as a messianic knot, that is, resistance to violence woven by those who live in “the shadows of the shadows of the shadows.”

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"By his wounds we shall be healed," says the oxymoron from the book of Isaiah (53:5), written by a disciple of the prophet during his people's exile in Babylon. This is perhaps the pinnacle of Old Testament revelation and one of the most radical truths about the human condition, politics, and hope. It is in this light, of course, that the torture and execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Roman authorities, in complicity with the authorities of the Temple of Jerusalem and the enraged mob, will be read centuries later.

Exile was a spiritual and theological place for the disciple of the prophet, as it was for John the Baptist and so many prophets throughout history, "whose voice cries in the wilderness" (John 1:23). Until we reach the voice of Munther Isaac in the 2021 Christmas sermon in Bethlehem, Palestine. The Babylonian exile signified a contradiction for the expatriated people: on the one hand, the pain of being torn from their homeland; on the other, the recognition that they have only been able to live off the crumbs of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king. And yet, in the four poems preserved in the Book of Isaiah, the true source of life will be the disciple-people. Babylonian power crushed Davidic power. But the people survived by virtue of their fidelity to the first covenant, if not all, at least a few. Tzadikkim or just people in history. And so, that suffering people is the source of "another way of being," beyond the essence of Babylonian power, in the power of those who resist. They are the servant of Yhwh.

Following this spark from the anonymous disciple of Isaiah, we can then reread the history of "the cursed of the earth," yesterday and today. In particular, the history of the Palestinian people, who, in the depths of their pain from the genocide they suffered, allow us all to heal from their wounds if we open our lives and actions to this cry. A slogan of the Global Sumud Flotilla says precisely this: "They wanted to erase Palestine, and now Palestine sails all the seas."

Faced with the monstrosity of the exile in Babylon, the Hebrew people of the anawin, from the poor of God, brings forth the beauty of Sumud or resistance to the catastrophe that has befallen them.

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What dialectic of history in the Hegelian reading recreated by Žižek governs history? That of opposites that annihilate each other in search of a supposed synthesis of Aufhebung or overcoming this rivalry that only prolongs the death throes of humanity with the triumph of the executioners.

Nor is the philosophy of the City of God, yearned for by John Milbank as a return to theocracy, overcoming the narrow limits of modern autonomy that became a nightmare, capable of crossing the abysmal line that separates privilege from desolation.

Are both authors in this fictitious dialogue right in raising the alternative between the dialectic of Holy Saturday that annihilates the weak in the Sheol and the paradox of Easter Sunday, which is announced as the triumph of the victims over the executioners?

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Neither paradox nor dialectic, but messianic contraction of the being that ages and dies.

Eckhart warned us about figures and idols (deitas) that replace the ineffable God (diuinitas). They can be religious or political idols. What is crucial in the life of the Spirit is, therefore, for the German Dominican, detachment (Gellasenheit) as a form of apophatic or negative, non-dialectical negation of the impersonations of Divinity.

Pseudo-Dionysius had previously explored this path of overcoming the ego, giving rise to the experience of the Mothers and Fathers of the desert in their confrontation with the demons before arriving at the contemplation of the mysterion of the living God.

Therefore, today, apophatic theology is a companion to the political theory of the commons, proposed by collectives and subjectivities located on the peripheries of the hegemonic world, but rooted in the world of the vital connection between the human, the cosmic, and the divine.

By listening to the outcry, indignation, and hope of today's most vulnerable, we can then access the apparent monstrosity of Christ, which then becomes the beauty of the forgotten who re-exist when they say enough to the violence of the imperial being that kills.

Puebla, September 14, 2025

September 14, 2025
Iván Gardea, Lynching, Cuernavaca, 2020

Ecclesiastical violence: a Girardian reading

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

A few days ago we learned about the Father Alberto Anguiano García resigned from the rectorship of the Pontifical University of Mexico, in the second year of his second term as rector, as a protest against the “workplace harassment and institutional violence” he suffered at the hands of the Vatican Curia and the authorities of that ecclesiastical university, which has been in existence for barely forty years.

The reasons given by the rector for his unilateral removal from office, an act that led to his resignation, are revealing, as they reveal a systemic problem in ecclesiastical institutions, which frequently act as if they had their own jurisdiction, impervious to civil jurisdiction, with labor rights at stake, as well as to public opinion in modern societies.

While, like every educational institution in Mexico, the UPM is subject to civil law regarding labor and education, the procedures in this case reveal a systemic violence that must be addressed in order to dismantle and make way for other methods of action, in keeping with the Gospel and the freedom of individuals, especially when it concerns the common good that education represents. Even more urgently, we must reflect and act when it concerns a religious institution destined to communicate the contents of Christian revelation and the tradition that constantly arises from it. Ultimately, this is a matter of addressing the credibility crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in these dire days.

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I met Father Alberto as a student at the University of Madrid thirty years ago, when he was pursuing a postgraduate degree in theology in 1995, during a course I taught on Emmanuel Levinas and his concept of revelation rooted in the Hebrew tradition and in dialogue with "the philosophy spoken in Greek." He was the most brilliant student of those generations, not only for his high academic standing, but also for his theological ability to update the theological knowledge of the great Christian tradition in the midst of contemporary questions arising from science, psychoanalysis, and the challenges of secular culture.

Already as rector, his first term began in 2021 It was marked by a clear project to modernize the university, both in its curricula and in the urgent strategic planning to open up to new disciplines in the civil world and not be limited solely to the clerical sphere. Ecclesiastical faculties had to overcome their ostracism and enter into dialogue with other civil disciplines. Furthermore, according to the diagnosis, it was essential to promote institutional efficiency that would make a domestic institution viable in its vision, uses, and customs, to make it a credible interlocutor in the academic and ecclesial context, both nationally and internationally.

But internal resistance seems to have created a climate of aversion to these reforms which, due to the typical rivalry of any group protecting its interests, deployed a mechanism of expulsion against its main promoter. In order to maintain the unanimity of "all against one," proceeding like a true mimetic contagion, a typical scapegoat process was brewing. It was thought that by expelling the person singled out as the source of the collective evil from the group, the evil would be expelled from the institution, which would regain its tranquility once purified of its poison. As we can see in the engraving by Iván Gardea that accompanies this reflection (The Plot of Engraving), the talented Mexican engraver managed to masterfully capture this mechanism of rivalry, contagion and collective lynching to delineate with the force of his strokes the mimetic desire that gives rise to human culture based on sacrifices since we have historical memory as a human species.

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how the crisis is resolved, we know that the victimizing mechanism is the satanic lie that hides "things hidden since the foundation of the world," as René Girard said (Things hidden since the foundation of the world) quoting the Gospel of Matthew: “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables, and will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35). The parables of the Reign of God that Jesus told in Galilee evoked ways to overcome the violence that lurks in the human heart precisely as a mimetic desire that engenders rivalry and fratricide. If the community involved does not internally dismantle the mechanism of rivalry and hatred, the poison will continue to infect its internal relationships and will continue to create new processes of self-protection, unanimity of all against one, expulsion and lies, producing new victims.

From this fund anthropological that appears as a cause systemic Of the institutional violence suffered by Father Alberto, what is important now is to emphasize the need for accountability from ecclesiastical institutions, both internally and externally. Moving forward, a process of collective healing of memory will be necessary, with justice and truth first for the victims, and with accountability for the perpetrators.

Unfortunately, given the prevailing clericalism, as a structure systemic which is perpetuated precisely by making victims invisible, it is necessary to bring this institutional distortion into the public sphere so that paths of memory can emerge, with justice and truth, that restore the scant credibility of a university institution founded in 1982 to serve the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico and Mexican society as a whole.

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The institutional complicity that led to Father Alberto's expulsion is similar to other instances of clerical violence in today's world.

Such systemic clerical violence can be traced to similar crises, such as that of the Roman Catholic Church in Chile, which has produced victims of sexual abuse committed by clergy against adult women and minors for half a century. They have been subjected for decades to systemic psychological, sexual, and spiritual violence, which has left its mark on the victims and has protected the perpetrators of these crimes from impunity, protected by what Rita Segato (The war against women) called it "the masculinity pact." There's talk of reparation, but it revictimizes the victims and leaves no substantial changes in institutional life such as schools, religious congregations, parishes, and dioceses.

A brilliant doctoral thesis in progress on this topic, prepared by Soledad del Villar Tagle (Abuses in the Church. Concilium. International Journal of Theology, (402)), will document with compelling testimonies and a rigorous interdisciplinary analysis, this abuse of clerical power that requires, of course, restorative justice for victims and survivors, along with a new theology of the Church. This feminist theology from women survivors of sexual and spiritual abuse by clergy will shed light on promoting the necessary changes to overcome this systemic violence characteristic of patriarchy, in its version of clericalism, as a religious expression of the war against women.

The feminist theology that emerges from the abuse crisis proposes a spirituality that springs from the wounds of Christ's wounded social body, going beyond pious considerations that venerate the wounds of the Crucified One but render invisible the victims of yesterday and today, desecrated in their bodies, minds, and souls by this systemic clerical violence.

Pope Francis' invitation to live a Holy Year in 2025 (Do not confuse. Bull of Invocation of the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025) in order to learn to be pilgrims of hope in times of despair, addresses the Roman Catholic Church. Throughout the year, Pope Leo XIV has continued this initiative, particularly calling young people to be part of this journey of conversion to sow hope in today's world.

But these calls will only make sense if they are rooted in attentive listening to survivors of any systemic violence, including ecclesiastical violence, which unfortunately continues to wield its predatory power as a religious caste of clericalism, unsustainable in our times.

Mexico City, July 26, 2025

July 26, 2025
Exocé Kasongo, Last Punk, print on demand, 2021

The body of the Messiah: between uncertainty and alert

By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

A collective emotion of panic is sweeping through humanity from all four corners of the globe at the present time due to the war in the Middle East unleashed by Israel and Hamas, which is now spreading from Lebanon and Syria to the ancient land of Iran. This fire is being fanned by the boundless ambition of the United States, a new phase of modern imperialism, with its lackeys in various parts of the world. The recent protests under the slogan "#No King" in that country have only opened a small crack in the wall of white supremacy and Western capitalism, which, as the Zapatistas have been reminding us for a decade (Critical Thinking Against the Capitalist Hydra I) is like a many-headed hydra that reproduces more strongly each time one of its heads is cut off.

The devastation in Gaza continues in real time, as digital media vividly reproduces scenes of burning buildings in Tehran and a desperate mass of Israelis trying to enter bomb shelters in Tel Aviv.

Since 2007 René Girard (Clausewitz at the Extremes: Politics, War, and Apocalypse) had seen this "escalation to extremes" coming with a sharp apocalyptic eye, analyzing the logic of war as a final solution to eliminate the rival, from the Treatise on War of a Prussian general named Clausewitz. Girard interpreted this foretold catastrophe by stating that modern society had become the civilization that forgot Christ's invitation to dismantle "the lie of Satan." A path of mimetic violence that consists in believing that by sacrificing a few, the majority will be preserved from destruction. This "ancient path of wicked men," as the Book of Job (22: 15-16) says, commented on by Girard, is false because, despite the scapegoats, evil continues to nest in the human heart, marked by rivalry, contagion, and the sacrifice of others, which will continue to produce new victims until "the righteous people of history" stop this spiral of violence in their own bodies, as Saint Paul evokes in his letter to the Ephesians (2:14) when speaking of Christ on the cross.

Such a victimizing process is carried out today by the states that perpetrate war. We see it spreading in Russia, the United States, Israel, El Salvador, and so many other countries where elites who govern with the cynicism of privileged minorities are willing to sacrifice "the disposable" for the sake of supposed national security, a prosperous economy, regional peace, or the "free world."

The fear of the outbreak of nuclear war paralyzes us. We already saw its devastating effects eighty years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when atomic energy was used as a weapon of war by the United States, which has since controlled global foreign policy, with the complicity of NATO and other states that decide who can or cannot develop this technology. This is a new form of sovereign power which is imposed as a geopolitical strategy of deterrence and control of the planet. We are also familiar with the devastating ecological risks of nuclear accidents following the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011, whose human victims and thousands of animal and plant species continue to be affected by the devastating effects of this tiny, out-of-control atomic force.

And yet, we must not forget that these same victims have struggled to become survivors who recover their own dignity and historical strength in the midst of horror. Jean-Pierre Dupuy reminded us in 2002 in his book For an illustrated catastrophism and others who followed him the importance of learning from the victims of nuclear energy abuse their ways of resisting.

We must subvert the logic of the powerful who capture our imagination with their greed for possession. By listening to those who confront evil in their own bodies and territories, thanks to their indignation and creativity, we can move from panic and uncertainty to a state of alert that allows us to change here and now that logic of death into processes of life and mutual care. It is up to us to take charge of our life stories, rooted in he place typical of our communities and towns, as Jean Robert said from Cuernavaca to inhabit the place from the proportion of the walker (Thinking while walking).

Peace "from below" and from the reverse side of the history of the powerful is what we can build every day. Searching mothers in Argentina and Mexico have done so for decades. Indigenous peoples do so based on their knowledge and forms of communal organization. Women imagine and create it in their networks of care, confronting patriarchy for millennia. Collectives build it against the current. queer/cuir who face the various phobias of yesterday and today.

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I am writing these lines in Durban, South Africa, on the coast of the Indian Ocean, during a break from the workshop on "Hope and Healing" shared with religious and spiritual leaders of the region. One of them told us yesterday of his concern about the tasks pending in this country, after two decades of national refoundation following the abolition of the Apartheid In 1994, the ethical leadership of the South African people continues to bear fruit, such as the complaint filed by the South African State with the International Supreme Court in The Hague for the Palestinian genocide carried out by the State of Israel. However, within the country, there are serious pending issues, such as agrarian reform that would redistribute land still owned by the Afrikaners in the territory's 60%. The working groups told stories of South African youth blinded by the digital world and its vicissitudes, enveloping the imagination of a people with false hopes that make it impossible to face new challenges. Challenges such as the rejection of migration by the population from neighboring countries like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Lesotho, due to the famine or war they suffer, the successive corruption of governments, and the lack of accountability of authorities at all levels. Searching together for criteria to confront this crisis of uncertainty, we have found that spiritualities of humanity, such as the African healing tradition and the churches of various denominations close to the people in the peripheries, with their admirable wealth of ways of life, meditation and healing practices, represent ways of subversive of community in the face of religious monopoly in all traditions. These spiritualities are an oasis for the people who inhabit "the region of non-being" evoked by Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth).

But these spiritualities need to be recovered in their inner strength of rebellion against evil and the development of other ways of life. Today more than ever, it is necessary to dismantle the power of religious ideologies that turn spiritualities into instruments for manipulating consciences, bodies, and territories.

Humanity is called today to move from panic and uncertainty to a state of alert, that is, to creative imagination which mobilizes the forces of each person and community, weaving bonds of life in the midst of death. In the Christian tradition today it is celebrated Corpus Christiyou, the body of the Messiah. This is not a religious mythology that sacralizes objects, but the living memory of humanity and the cosmos as messianic body mortally wounded, fighting for life. In several countries, initiatives by governments and churches to promote peace are emerging. In Mexico, the “National Dialogue for Peace" promoted this weekend by several Catholic organizations is a reflection of this clamor.

But we must not forget that the call for peace that arises in this context of imminent war in the Middle East and in every region of the planet will be a "flame flash" if that fire is not fanned. inside of each of our bodies and communities with practices of self-care, meditation and mutual accompaniment, new modes of governance and transitional justice that stop the spiral of hatred that is rampant throughout the world.

In this way, we will be able to move from uncertainty to critical and hopeful vigilance as humanity, which, together with all of creation, resists and re-exists to become the living body of the Messiah.

Durban, South Africa

June 21, 2025

June 21, 2025

English