The Latin rite of the Catholic Church is today celebrating the feast of St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), a Renaissance Jesuit and cardinal, who most notoriously was one of the Inquisitors who condemned Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake in 1600 and was involved in the first summoning of Galileo Galilei in 1616 to Rome on orders from Pope Paul V. This summons was not exactly a full-bore “trial.” Rather, Bellarmine wanted to inform Galileo that the Congregation of the Index was about to condemn the heliocentric model of Copernicus by placing this Polish cleric’s famous book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres on the Index of Forbidden Books. Given that upcoming condemnation, Bellarmine told Galileo that Copernican theories could no longer be “defended or held,” although Catholic astronomers could continue to discuss heliocentrism as a mathematical fiction.

On the later election Maffeo Cardinal Barberini as Pope Urban VIII—who was both a friend of Galileo and had opposed Bellarmine’s condemnation of heliocentrism in 1616—Galileo ventured to propose the Copernican model once more in his epochal Dialogue between the Two Chief World Systems of 1632, which itself led, as everyone knows, to his condemnation by the Inquisition a year later, after which he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

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On the recommendation of David Bentley Hart, I read Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Like Hart, I too enjoyed the book and was relieved that Dawkins kept his belligerence against religion mostly in check. (Operative word: mostly.)

One passage, though, caught my attention for its relevance to the debate over abortion. It comes from the chapter called “You Did It Yourself in Nine Months,” and goes as follows:

The irascible genius J.B.S. Haldane, who did so much else besides being one of the three leading architects of neo-Darwinism, was once challenged by a lady after a public lecture. It’s a word-of-mouth anecdote, and John Maynard Smith is sadly not available to confirm the exact words, but this is approximately how the exchange went:

Evolution sceptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling.

JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took nine months.

The key word is that deceptively simple second-person personal pronoun you. Yes, madam, you did it in nine months; and if at any point in those nine months an abortionist had intervened, you wouldn’t be here to raise your questions.

The beauty of this argument comes from its simplicity. The immorality of abortion was never about religion to begin with (except insofar as the religion in question sees itself as a guardian of natural law). Yes, the question of ensoulment is obviously relevant; but it is also an ineluctably metaphysical question as well, a field notorious for generating interminable disagreements.

For getting to the heart of the issue all one has to do is point to one’s interlocutor’s personal interest in the matter: you did it in nine months, so who are you to deny that same remarkable success to others? On this point see Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen’s Embryo: A Defense of Human Life..

Mary Rose asks, “Should Catholics thank the Boston Globe and the New York Times” a question prompted by my homily for Divine Mercy Sunday, published today by her kind hospitality.

Although I mentioned the press generically in my homily, now that the question has become specific, I would say (generally speaking), the Globe did an important service to the Catholic Church in the United States (I am not claiming that was the intent of the editors, of course), whereas the recent coverage by the Times has been flagrantly tendentious, even obviously so, as William McGurn showed recently in the April 6, 2010 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, in my schema the Globe uncovered the operations of “the enemy of our human nature” as described by St. Ignatius in the first “rule” for discerning spirits that I quoted; whereas the Times is acting like the enemy as described by the second.

Irritated as some bloggers might be that I would condescend to praise so debt-ridden and jejune an enterprise as the Globe, I still think that paper did the Church a big favor, painful as the exposure has been. As the blogger Diogenes over at Catholic Culture rightly points out, what came to light during the Long Lent of 2002 were the following sins (and sins they were):

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The name of René Girard, I’ve noticed, has of late been cropping up on this site a bit more often than usual. I don’t want to rehearse what I’ve written elsewhere on this remarkably original thinker, now inducted into “The Immortals” of the Académie Française, except maybe to stress that, once one begins to understand Girard’s idée fixe (his term), an astonishing amount of data from humanity’s social life begins to fall into place, from Sophocles and Shakespeare to adultery and Hollywood gossip .

But what about the Stone Age? Anyone with the least familiarity with Girard’s thought knows that for him “mimetic desire” means that we humans, as social beings, desire what others happen to want, so that desiring is a learned behavior, and not therefore inscribed in our biological appetites. Moreover, he also insists that the pathos of this imitative desire begins at the earliest emergence of our species. But how can that latter thesis be established anthropologically? Do we not here meet the boundary where Girard’s thought becomes pure speculation, however provocative his perspective might be?

I am obviously not the one to render a judgment on that question. However, news of a recent excavation in Germany from Der Spiegel makes me wonder: From the description of the findings of these archeologists, it seems that the onset of the Girardian dynamic of scapegoating for the sake of social cohesion can be dated, at the latest, from around the sixth millennium before Christ. And if this thesis pans out among the experts, then surely we can assume that other, even earlier primitive societies—which for whatever reason are now made inaccessible to us or have yet to be discovered—must have displayed that same dynamic.

At all events, I think I can safely make at least this prediction: decades and perhaps centuries from now—that is, long after the fashionable thinkers of our time (Derrida, Lacan, Žižek) are forgotten—people will be debating Girard’s thought. One sign of his originality is that, against the contemporary background, he is so noticeably original.