Mourning the Culture of Death

+ Enlarge

I write this as I wait for the start of the Mass for the Unborn and Ceremony of Light, at which we will pray for an end of abortion. Today is also the day after the funeral Mass for Father Reynato Rodillas, who died from the coronavirus less than two weeks ago. The two events are connected in my mind not only by time but also by the Catholic belief in the sanctity of all human life, from conception to natural death.

Since abortion became legal in the United States in 1973, an estimated 63 million children have been killed in the womb. The number is mind-boggling; it’s more than the population of Italy – an entire country’s worth of people who never got the chance to live, to love and be loved, to contribute their talents to the world, to enjoy their God-given right to life.

At the Mass, we will pray for those souls lost to abortion, and also for the women and men who choose abortion or are complicit in the act. I have known women who chose abortion because they feared they couldn’t give the child a good life. I also know people who consider the child in the womb not a person but rather as simply a clump of cells. As much as I believe abortion to be an intrinsic evil, I can’t find it in my heart to condemn women who believe the child they carry is better off dead rather than being brought into whatever struggles the mother is facing. Nor can I condemn those who don’t believe, as I do, that a child in the womb is indeed a person with the same inalienable rights as the mother. I don’t agree with them, I beseech God to “harden not their hearts,” I offer to them the truth, but I can’t condemn them, not least because Jesus tells me that I shouldn’t judge.

Abortion is a flagrant example of the “culture of death” that Pope Francis decries as prevalent in today’s society. This is a phrase that Pope John Paul II used in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, writing that this is “In a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or lifestyle of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated.”

I think perhaps this attitude has contributed to our nation having the highest number of COVID-19-related deaths in the world – exceeding 405,000, about the total number of deaths of American military personnel during World War II. I think this because now there are Americans who consider COVID-19 a hoax or who don’t believe it’s a serious concern, just as there are those who believe that a child in the womb is nothing more than a clump of cells. And there are those who refuse to compromise their lifestyle even though, by doing so, they would protect people who are at risk for the disease.

In Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II pointed out that “the Church declares that unconditional respect for the right to life of every innocent person – from conception to natural death – is one of the pillars on which every civil society stands.” Such a society, he says, would recognize “the defense of the fundamental rights of the human person, especially of the weakest, as its primary duty.”

Would Fr. Rene have died if the United States were a society that recognized the fundamental rights of every human being, if we had a nationwide response to the pandemic like that of New Zealand, where only 25 people have died of the virus? Maybe. But until we create such a society, in which the sanctity of every human life is accepted as inviolable, there will continue to be a culture that shrugs at abortion and turns a cold shoulder to the deaths of hundreds of thousands from disease.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.