Coping with the Culture of Death

Coping with the Culture of Death
www.cinopsbegone.blogspot.com , Sunday, Feb.17, 2008

It was Pope John Paul II who coined the term Culture of Death. In section 50 of his Encyclical, The Gospel of Life March 25. 1995 “Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a dramatic conflict between the ‘culture of death’ and the ‘culture of life.’ This pope is the role model for this blog. St. Thomas More is also our model and patron.

On the mercilessly hot morning of August 15, 1993, the Feast of the Assumption, Pope John Paul II summed up in his own words his own distress over the present state of the world as he addressed a half million young people gathered at Cherry Creek State Park near Denver for World Youth Day:

“A ‘CULTURE OF DEATH’ seeks to impose itself on our desire to live and live to the full. There are those who reject the light of life, preferring the fruitless works of darkness.’ Their harvest is injustice, discrimination, exploitation, deceit, violence. In every age, a measure of their apparent success is the death of innocents. In our century, as no other time in history, the ‘culture of death’ has assumed a social and institutional form of legality to justify the most horrific crimes against humanity: genocide, ‘final solutions,’ ‘ethnic cleansings’ and the massive taking of lives of human beings even before they are born of before they reach they are born or before they reach the natural point of death…. Vast sectors of society are confused about what is right and what is wrong, and are at the mercy of those with the power to ‘create’ opinion and impose it on others.”

The evening before, during the prayer vigil at the park, the pope expressed grave warnings to his audience.

“Christ, the Good Shepherd … sees so many young people throwing away their lives a flight into irresponsibility and falsehood. Drug and alcohol abuse, pornography and sexual disorder, violence: these are grave social problems which call for a social response from the whole of society, within each country and on the international level…. In a technological culture in which people are used to dominating matter, discovering its laws and mechanism in order to transform it according to their wishes, the danger arises of also wanting to manipulate conscience and its demands. In a culture which holds that no universal valid truth is possible, nothing is absolute. Therefore, in the end – they say – objective goodness and evil no longer matter. Good comes to mean what is pleasing or useful at a particular moment. Evil means what contradicts our subjective wishes. Each person can build a private system of values.

The above are excerpts from the book: The Private Prayers of POPE JOHN PAUL II a LIFE IN PRAYER, Atria Books, N. Y., London, Toronto, Sydney, 2005

George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.