From the beginning, religion and politics have been more intertwined than modern man wants to acknowledge. Religion, concerned with eternal life, and politics, limited to temporal order, form a binomial in permanent tension. When transcendence is dispensed with, politics degenerates into pure earthly calculation and loses its orientation toward the common good. It is no coincidence that Benedict XVI recalled that faith frees politics from the ideological myths that intoxicate it today.
The Consensus as Myth
In contemporary politics, everything is subjected to consensus, even that which does not depend on pacts: life, sex, death. Aristotle already warned that convention does not make just what is contrary to nature. The problem is that, by reducing everything to agreements, truth is replaced by votes, and the result is not justice but mere parliamentary arithmetic. Consensus, turned into dogma, rises as a secular religion that smothers hope and empties the beyond of meaning.
The Biopolitics of Death
Politics, dragged by bio-ideologies, has come to manage life as if it were a laboratory: educational engineering, media propaganda, and genetic manipulation. And when life is politicized, death is inevitably politicized as well. What was always a common, intimate, and universal experience now becomes an object of state legislation, just another administrative file. This appropriation is nothing other than totalitarianism: the absorption of the human by the machine of power.
Sovietized Democracies
Roca denounces an unsettling phenomenon: the liberal democracies of the West are increasingly resembling the communism they claimed to combat. The so-called “thanatocracy” is the sign of our times: a State that legislates on the beginning and end of life as if they were bureaucratic permits. By secularizing death, hope is eliminated and human justice is absolutized, incapable of offering more than temporary and partial solutions. A world that pretends to manufacture its own justice is, in the words of Benedict XVI, a world without hope.
From Divine Filiation to Pseudo-State Paternity
The modern State presents itself as a father who grants and withdraws rights at will. But it is not a father, but a simulacrum of paternity. While religion reminded man that he was a son of God, secular politics turns him into a son of the State. Hence, the evangelical formula “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” has been replaced by an unsettling “To Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to Caesar what is God’s.” The consequence is clear: the State devours the common, even death, and turns it into a public matter, snatching it from its intimate and universal dimension.
In Right to Live, Álvaro Roca unmasks the great lie of our time: that death can be legislated, administered, and distributed by decree. His denunciation is clear: by politicizing death, the State seeks to usurp the sacred, reducing the most human to a mere procedure. An essential book to understand how the culture of death disguises itself as democracy and rights.