In a lyrical essay originally
published in Crisis Magazine, Catholic philosopher and Senior Fellow of
Human Life International, Donald DeMarco, Ph.D., poignantly paints the
stark division between the pro-life worldview, and the worldview
espoused by the Culture of Death. Invoking T.S. Eliot’s seminal poem, The Waste Land, Dr. DeMarco suggests that Eliot captured the essential characteristics of the Culture of Death.
In
such a culture, death is presumed to have the final say, and as such is
the measure of all things: life leads to death, and then no more. Given
this, life is suffused with a sense of bleak hopelessness, a “tale told
by an idiot…etc.” Children – the most tangible sign of a society’s hope
for and investment in the future – are a thing to be prevented through
contraception, sexuality is reduced to the tawdry and transactional,
suicide ever lurks on the peripheries, and beauty and fertility appear
as things painful and threatening (“April is the cruellest month.”).
Against
this bleak pessimism, Dr. DeMarco sets up the testimony of an array of
poets who saw beneath even the worst of life’s struggles and sorrows a
rich ore of beauty and meaning...
