We tend to misunderstand the culture of death, I think. We think its advocates and practitioners want death, however they explain themselves. The profit-making abortionist or someone like Dr. Kevorkian is our symbol for it. Very few people really like death. Very few want it. Always everyone wants life. The culture of death begins in this desire for life and its fruits — but life sought in the wrong ways and usually with the wrong people.

The culture of death begins in a culture of pseudo-life. In particular, it begins in man’s natural and universal desire for sexual connection, for true union with another, but becomes a culture of death through man’s insistence on making connections he is not allowed to make, which he makes — which we all, being sinners, make in some way — mostly because the proper connections cost too much.

Fallen men want life and its fruits because they are made in the image of Him who created life, but they want life and its fruits on their terms because they have rejected the ways He has said that life is to be found. The teenagers enjoying each other in a college dorm room, the man on a business trip picking up a woman at the bar, the woman reading Cosmopolitan, the man or woman indulging idly lustful thoughts about someone walking by, almost all of them want what life offers, but they do not want it in the way it is offered.

They do not want to pay in the currency by which life and its fruits are bought. They try to steal the fruit, and that theft is the source of the culture of death. Abortion is only the fine you have to pay when you get caught stealing, though it’s a fine that costs them far more than they realize. Other penalties may be demanded of them as well — divorce, depression, loneliness, mistrust and venereal diseases among them — and other people may have to pay the costs with them, not least their children, and their children’s children.

Whatever success they have in stealing the fruit, they lose in the long run, because in marriage and love you get what you pay for. The real joys, the lives that make others marvel, come to those who pay up front and make regular payments every day of their lives. Did we see more often what love does to people over time, and understood what miracles of charity we see, we would find it easier to pay what we ought.

The problem is not just the people who commit the obvious sexual sins. Even the husband or wife who lives in perfect faithfulness will fail in some other way, when they choose to serve themselves rather than their spouse or children. The single person who lives in perfect chastity will fail in some way as well. One of our great failures may be failing to show mercy to the victims of the culture of death. Another may be failing to share what we have (a home, in the case of married couples) with those who need it. We all want the benefits of the good things we have without paying all the costs. We all help create the culture of pseudo-life that leads to the culture of death.

The End of the Culture of Death

That’s a very bad thing to help create. The end of the culture of death is not the bright, happy world advertised in the movies and in the earnest articles of pro-choice journalists, in which sex is free and every child is a wanted child. It is not so much an emptier world, because so many fewer people live in it, though it is much emptier than it should be. It is a silent world, in which people live alienated from one another because they have not created life, because they have not loved each other by paying for life what life requires, but snatched what they wanted. There is no honor among thieves, and they cannot trust each other enough to form a community or make a culture of life, even the life they want.

The culture of death so affects our society because it is a culture of pseudo-life. It presents itself as bringing life, and bringing it on easy terms. Our society’s reigning ideals are all versions of the real fruits life offers, and in particular real, lasting, life-changing sexual connection. Think of the average PG-13 movie, in which promiscuous people suddenly find their life partner to whom (the audience is supposed to think) they will be faithful forever, though they had been unfaithful to dozens or hundreds of others before this.

Despite their previous affairs, their going to bed together – usually on very short acquaintance – is presented as if it were the wedding night of virgins. Their previous sexual experiences may have meant nothing to them, but this one is special. This one will last. This time they will be faithful till death do them part.

But they won’t, unless they are very lucky and unless they both repent and change. They have ignored the moral law too long to live by it now, and they have rejected it even in beginning this new relationship. They have taken what was not theirs to take (or to give), and they have not trained themselves to do anything but take. They have not trained themselves to give, which is to say, though “making love” they have not learned to love.

What will the hero do, if a speeding truck hits the heroine as she walks home after their night of passion, and leaves her with a shattered face and damaged brain? What will he do, if instead of giving him ecstatic, acrobatic nights, she needs him to feed her and dress her and wipe the drool from her chin and empty her bedpan? That may be the price life asks him for its fruits, and he is not likely to pay it if he could not pay the price of marrying her for the right to enjoy her body.

And ironically enough, the culture of death or pseudo-life fails even to deliver the sexual paradise it promises. It does not work very well even as erotic drama. It is not dramatic because it is not final or eternal, because it is not played for keeps. What does it really matter if the hero and heroine split up after their night together? They had enjoyed their time together in bed and will have other nights with other people.

The Culture of Life

The culture of life is the culture by which life and its fruits are sought by the rules life offers, in which they are not stolen but paid for. We see how different is the culture of life from the culture of death by how much more dramatic is the first. The culture of life is a life final and eternal, a life played for keeps.

In the wedding night of virgins we have the drama of the unveiling of something that has been kept secret and sacred till then, to be offered to one person only, then and forever. It is a dangerous offer, which may bring as much struggle and pain as pleasure, because one or the other may die or fall ill or waste away or even offer the secret and sacred thing to an outsider. The marriage may be wise or foolish, but in either case it is far more dramatic than the temporary affair of the hero and heroine who look deeply into each other’s eyes in one scene and land in bed the next.

In the nights of those who have long been married we have a different drama, or perhaps we have a later scene of the drama of the wedding night. It is the drama of something still kept secret and sacred but now given a home, and deepened by the fruit formed of the union: most of all the children now scattered sleeping around the house; but also by the house itself, made a home by the husband and wife together; by the flowers in the garden and the leftovers in the freezer; by the clean clothes folded and the dirty clothes waiting in baskets by the washer; by the crosses above the beds and the prayers said together every night since the first child was born; by the worn furniture and the ancient car never replaced because other things were needed more; by the long sleepless nights one stayed up with a sick child or the other worked to put food on the table.

All this may disappear, should the husband lose his job, a child die, the wife find her liver filled with cancer cells, and should the family fail in its response — if they choose the way of the culture of death. And even if things go well, still, after all these years, the husband and wife can give up or offer their shared and secret thing to an outsider. Always is failure a possibility. Always is marriage a drama.

The first fruit of living a culture of life is a new kind of life in which you find joy in living the life you have been given, even if it is not the life you chose. The first fruit of life lived as it is meant to be lived is a new kind of life, in which you become a different person — become, indeed, the sort of person who will be happy if you never get anything you want. You become the sort of person who ensures that the drama has a happy ending. Whatever the trials you face, whatever you suffer, your life gives life.

A priest I know told me about a very sick man and his wife he watched at a special Mass celebrated for couples who had been married a long time. He was sitting near the altar and looked out on the front row, where the sick and handicapped had been seated. The husband lay on a gurney, having suffered for years from a degenerative disease that left him able only to move his eyes.

His wife stood by him, and when the time came for the wives to renew their vows, she stood and took his hand and looked into his eyes as she renewed her vows to him. And then it was the husbands’ turn, and she took his hand and looked into his eyes as she spoke the words for him, and renewed his vows to her.

In this woman the culture of death is defeated. In her are life’s true fruits to be seen. She has paid for them in ways she did not expect when she married, but having paid, she can hold the hand of her husband and tell the world she loves him, and he loves her, though he cannot hold her hand nor speak a word.