By REY FLORES
We often hear about the culture of death and for many practicing Catholics, the term usually evokes thoughts of abortion, contraception, euthanasia, eugenics, assisted suicide, and possibly homosexuality.
Within a more secular mindset, the term “culture of death” would more than likely be associated with the death penalty, gun violence, and war; but I wouldn’t put it past secularists to also include the killing of animals for hunting and food, and the “killing” of the environment as aspects of their version of a “culture of death.” It is doubtful, however, that they would ever admit that there was a culture of death, let alone use that term.
I would argue that our “culture of death” truly encompasses so much more.
In addition to the obvious forms of death, like abortion and contraception, what about adultery, cohabitation, fornication, pornography, alcoholism, addictions, divorce, and gluttony?
Certainly adultery, cohabitation, divorce, fornication, and pornography all contribute to the misuse and abuse of human sexuality to the detriment of institutions like traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and the family itself. This furthers our culture of death.
What is man’s modern-day fascination with death? We surround ourselves with garbage television programs like The Walking Dead, we watch endless death and violence in Hollywood films, our children are hooked on videogames where the players can blow each other’s brains out in graphic detail, and the entertainment industry pumps out noise they call music which glorifies sex and violence as mandatory virtues for the young.
In all these forms, death ceases to be a natural process, but is transformed into a disordered obsession.
According to Dictionary.com, the word “necromania” is defined as: “An abnormal tendency to dwell with longing on death.” This modern “longing on death” is unhealthy, unnatural, and dysfunctional — at best.
Sadly, in today’s culture we are systemically being desensitized to death, mainly by things like abortion and terrorism. It used to be that bombings in public places targeting innocent civilians only happened in places like Israel and Egypt, and even Ireland, but never or very rarely in most Western countries.
Today as each news cycle rotates, random mass shootings and public bombings no longer faze us, not even when they happen on our own soil. It seems that when events like the Columbine shootings happened — in the spring of 1999 — it was months of news coverage, national grieving and retrospect as to why it happened, and endless analysis on how similar incidents could and should be avoided in the future. Then came September 11, 2001, better known as 9/11.
Since 9/11 took place, our sensitivities to such death and destruction have been constantly chipped away. Children today watch the constant terrorist attacks on television and on the Internet, not to mention the beheadings of Christians throughout the world, leading to their complacent acceptance of such bloody times.
Man’s disordered obsession with death can be traced back to the ancient cultures — Egyptians, the Greeks, the Mongolians, the Nordics, and the Aztecs. These cultures obsessed in a variety of ways from elaborate funeral rituals to ripping the still-beating hearts out of people’s chests as a sacrifice to their mythical gods.
Today’s human sacrifices are systemically practiced by death-peddlers Planned Parenthood, Islamic terrorists, other like-minded Satanists, and your random psychopath, drug dealer, or gang member — in that order.
Mexicans are now living in one of the most violent times in their history, making the Cristero wars of the 1920s look like the acts of amateurs. Today’s Mexico may still be under the mantle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but the demonic Santa Muerte, an evil skeletal anti-Mary, is gaining more believers each day in the streets of the poorest barrios in Mexico City.
Garbage bags full of human heads and daily street executions are not uncommon in former tourist paradises like Acapulco. The narcotraficantes (narcotic traffickers) leave such grisly “calling cards” as a warning to competing drug traffickers and law enforcement to leave them alone or face a similar bloody fate.
The bodies of murdered young women strewn on the streets and outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, a border town south of El Paso, Texas, have become so common place that newspapers barely report on them anymore.
Yes, our extremely disordered obsession with death is not good, not good at all. It has created a society where all human life is cheap. It’s not just the dead, but the living dead like the alcoholics, drug addicts, and invisible “disposable” humans like the poor and homeless. These people are truly the “walking dead” in a heartless society which no longer values the sanctity of human life in all its forms.
It is sad to think that each human life extinguished in an unexpected and violent way — or thrown away like garbage as happens to the homeless — was once God’s newest creation brought upon the world in a glorious moment of life itself. From a blinding beautiful brilliance to a dying ember or reduced to nothing but ashes.
In the Book of Genesis, chapter 3, verse 19 we learn: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.”
Death itself is not a bad thing if we accept and respect it as God planned it for us. After all, death is written about in Scripture and is a huge part of our Catholicism. Our Church is surrounded by the symbolism of death, starting with the crucifixion of our Lord dying on the cross, and countless martyred saints having died for refusing to deny Christ.
The natural and inevitable death of the flesh in God’s plan is for us to strive for holiness, and eventually join Him in eternal life. Viva la vida!
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(Rey Flores is a Catholic writer and speaker. Contact Rey at reyfloresusa@gmail.com.)
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