How R. Girard Serves the Magisterium

And evidence that I'm a slower reader than Aramis

From the Introduction to Girard's Evolution and Conversion, Pierpaolo Antonello and Joao Cezar de Castro Rocha write:

Rephrasing Simone Wei's statement that 'before presenting a "theory of God", a theology, the Gospels presents (typo!) a "theory of man", an anthropology, Girard maintains that Christianity is essentially the cultural and moral acknowledgement of the sacrificial origins of our culture and our society. The Gospels become the hermeneutical key that allows us to rethink both mythology and ancient texts as the progressive coming-to-terms of humanity with the violent matrix of the cultural order. Christ's sacrifice is the moment of complete arbitrariness of the victimary mechanism on which the sacred and symbolic order of archaic societies was built and kept stable. In this sense, Girard goes against common (academic) assumptions, and takes on board the Judaeo-Christian tradition as having primary responsibility for the de-mythification and de-sacralization of the world ... The end of (conventional primitive sacred) religion, and even scientific atheism itself, has been produced by a (faith): Christianity.

Thus, we can capsulize Girard's insight by way of our friend and mentor, Gil Bailie, in the words of Henri-Marie Cardinal de Lubac, "Christianity is not one of the great things of history: it is history which is one of the great things of Christianity."