The Culture of Death

Realizing the Consequences of Our Actions

By: Chris Sparks

Posted: 4/28/09

I write this in fear and trembling, for I know I need to act along the lines I lay out below, and have not fully done so. And yet what I have written is the truth, as best I can see it, and so I must speak it, though I am less than the truth which I speak. And the truth is this:
Ladies and Gentlemen, we live in the culture of death.
Let that phrase ring throughout the West. Let us never cease to repeat it, till all ears reverberate with the aftershock of that monstrosity: we live in the culture of death.
How?
Tell me: what happened to us, that abortion has become a regrettable necessity?
What happened, so that we will show images of almost anything in our movies, our culture, our lives-will call for photos of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq, will demand to see the photos from Abu Ghraib, will look upon images of the victims of the Holocaust, of Stalin, of World Wars, of atomic bomb victims, of almost every other example of man's inhumanity to man-except for images of abortion? When did we accomplish this remarkable feat of detaching the consequences from the action?
More importantly for the pro-life world: when did we neglect, or forget, to emblazon the words of Mother Teresa over the doors of every parish church, over every chancery, over every home where a barren couple dwells or a well-off family with grown children tend an empty nest-in short, when did we forget to mark our homes as within the covenant of the Lord so that the angel of death will pass over the children dwelling therein?
Where have we posted this?
"…this I appeal in India, I appeal everywhere: Let us bring the child back, and this year being the child's year: What have we done for the child? At the beginning of the year I told, I spoke everywhere and I said: Let us make this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted. And today is the end of the year, have we really made the children wanted? I will give you something terrifying. We are fighting abortion by adoption, we have saved thousands of lives, we have sent words to all the clinics, to the hospitals, police stations - please don't destroy the child, we will take the child. So every hour of the day and night it is always somebody, we have quite a number of unwedded mothers - tell them come, we will take care of you, we will take the child from you, and we will get a home for the child. And we have a tremendous demand from families who have no children, that is the blessing of God for us. And also, we are doing another thing which is very beautiful - we are teaching our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of the street, natural family planning."
We live in the culture of death.
Such a stark, simple phrase, and yet from that phrase grows the demographic decline of Europe, and the collapse of countries and civilizations, the destruction of all things, of anything, because we have decided that it is better to die than to live. We have broken apart the ancient idea-it is wrong to kill an innocent. Further, we have failed to make this a culture in which abortion makes no sense, in which it is so easy to have your child placed with a safe, healthy, happy, holy home that death for your child makes no sense. We are willing to kill the innocent in the name of comfort, of cosmetics, of convenience-we , the society, the culture.
Welcome to the Culture of Death-waiting for your last breath. Here we are, we, the survivors, attending college, working, studying, playing, in the midst of a ghastly quiet where other people, by rights, ought to be. And the clutching hand of the grim reaper plucks at the far end of the lifespan as well, hurrying, hurrying on those held in suspended animation by the best care money can buy, or pulling those given diagnoses that drag them down, into depression, into an early grave made ready, waiting, by the state, by our votes, by the will of the people-that the people be killed when they fall ill.
How has it come to this? How have we not opened our hearts, our homes, our churches to the children? Because our churches have become a place of danger for the children? Culture of death-of innocence. Child's play slips into foul play in the places where God resides-more of the culture of death. Faith is killed with innocence and trust, lives rent and mangled in the maw of…
A culture of death. Once the most fundamental of taboos have been deconstructed, once Paulo Freire has applied his Pedagogy to the Oppressed and we have been conscientized out of our consciences because Freire only knows, Gramsci only knows, Marx only knows, the oppressed can do no wrong. No, the woman does not choose to have the abortion, it's all a product of the systemic pressures and structures of sin which compel this victim of the system to this choice. We, after all, live in a material world, a deterministic universe, one in which it is liberation theology to embrace one's powerlessness before the system in order to undermine that system from within. Drop limp in front of the mechanized might of the way things have always been and let them walk over your raised consciousness, your razed conscience, and in the process scream so loudly that Lenin's useful idiots decide that the way things have always been/the Catholic Church is the one to blame and ignore all the monstrosities of modernity which produce this situation-that a mother should forget her child.
Men, where are you? Adam, where are you? The serpent is in the Garden, and Eve looks longingly at that Tree, and why on earth are there women who conclude they have no choice but to kill their-your-child? Where the hell are the fathers, the Josephs, to guard the Woman and the Child from the ravages of Herod, from the slaughter of the innocents, from the stoning of the masses, for having a child of God out of wedlock? Where are the men to stop the angry families, to protect the innocent sisters, to leave the women alone, ALONE, until you are willing to lay down your life in her service and defense? Pick up your cross and follow Him-gaze on the face of His Mother, so that when you see the glorious, gorgeous, glamorous creature of God that is woman, you will remember that in every woman is Woman, and Mother, and Daughter, and Image and Likeness of God-and you will not seek the ultimate prize until you are willing to pay the ultimate price-to give yourself utterly, completely, and perpetually to her.

Chris Sparks is a Senior