Roger Scruton on the "great spiritual inheritance" of our law and politics

The Liberty Law Talk podcasts hosted by Richard Reinsch are a wonderful resource (if you have an iPhone, you can subscribe via Apple’s podcasts app). A recent conversation with Roger Scruton was especially interesting and included the following--and typically insightful--comment from Scruton (transcribed from the recording beginning at 15:30): 

I think my position is that you can’t detach what we are now from the history of our civilization, and the very fact that we have all these really remarkable ways of dealing with social conflict like the legal process, democratic process, and so on. The fact that we have those things is not to be understood as some kind of a priori invention. These are the byproducts of a civilization which was founded on something else. It was founded on a sacramental vision of what brings people together and the church has always exerted this control over people’s lives to remind them of this. It doesn’t do so anymore, of course, because we in many ways are in a post-Christian society but it...the Catholic Church made penitence into a sacrament and made the whole business of confession, accepting guilt, atoning for your faults, and begging for forgiveness--it made that into the fundamental religious experience, more fundamental than any other, and that worked its way into the legal system and the political system of the European states. You can certainly find it there in the law of tort in English common law and you can find it in everything until recently. I think we should always remember that we are downstream from this great spiritual inheritance.