Missing the meaning of pain and suffering

They say that science fiction is on its last legs, and one can see how that might be the case.

Science fiction is a genre that specializes in exploring the future and considering what societies might be like decades or centuries in the future, for better or for worse.

As a branch of literature, it has frequently helped us prepare for the future, often predicting it with eerie accuracy.

Science fiction’s real strength is not creating spaceships and aliens, but conjuring up ideas, such as supposing a world where youth and health are exalted, and anybody over a certain age or suffering any sort of illness is slotted for termination.

Today’s world, however, is warping at such a pace that it’s difficult to imagine a universe any more bizarre than the one we can see shaping up in the pages of any daily newspaper.

In black and white print, we can gaze into the future and glimpse a world as peculiar and repugnant as any imagined by the most talented fiction writer.

As I write this, it’s now Day 3 of the Globe and Mail’s euthanasia campaign, a seemingly unofficial crusade to churn out as much comment as possible on the advantages of giving Canadians the option of death as a solution to a host of societal problems, from our current health care dilemma to lingering and painful deaths.

It began on Tuesday with an opinion piece entitled “Civilized suicide is the way to cut costs.” Well, the pro-death argument doesn’t get much more frank than that.

In the past three days, there have been six letters in support of euthanasia, or as one writer calls it, “the third option.” There hasn’t been a single comment in support of life, or of the need to address the question of suffering.

As Pope John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae, suffering and death “are a part of human existence, and it is futile, not to say misleading, to try to hide them or ignore them.”

The Pope says “even pain and suffering have meaning and value when they are experienced in close connection with love received and given,” and people must be helped to understand the “profound mystery” of suffering in all its harsh reality. I will surmise, with some charity, that the Globe is not publishing letters for life because it’s not receiving them. That is our job.

One doesn’t have to be a science fiction writer to anticipate that if no one speaks out, the moral slide we’re on will continue.

Why wouldn’t it? A society that a generation ago deemed acceptable the “termination” of 12-week-old babies in the womb has lowered the bar to 16 or 20 weeks today. Suddenly, this week, word reaches us that Quebec is sending mothers who want to abort at 24 weeks, over the age of viability, to the U.S. at a cost of $5,000 U.S. per life.

That bar is not going to be raised again, not without the introduction of some moral check that rattles society and brings it to its senses; but then, what moral check might that be?

It has been some time since there was any moral proscription against much that used to be regarded as insane by a sane world:

• Promiscuity that is not only tolerated, but sanctioned with benefits funded by taxpayers.

• Homosexual and other deviant sexual behaviour enshrined and codified.

• Pornography as ubiquitous entertainment.

• Drug use promoted as recreation.

• The manipulation and destruction of human life at its earliest stage for utilitarian purposes.

• Treating the elderly and the infirm as malignancies that must be eradicated rather than as challenges that test our ability to extend ourselves in love and care.

The pursuit of everything that is alluring, the extermination of everything and everyone that is inconvenient, and the exploitation of everything and everyone that is beneficial: this is the moral code of today.

The culture of death, without so much as a tip of the hat to any moral truth higher than that permitted by the country’s high courts, will continue to spread its tentacles, with the elderly and sick on the chopping block next, and yet another generation weaned on hedonism and unable to recognize genuine freedom when in its very midst.

Predictions of moral decline will always come true, as long as the only moral check that matters, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is banished from polite society, and perhaps soon from all society.

If social and moral decay is making the strides it is at the moment, what will restrain it tomorrow? Only when those who are still informed and convinced of the truth are willing to embrace the difficult cross ahead and reconvert the world will there be a swing back to sanity.

It is interesting that with the decline in science fiction comes an upswing in popularity for fantasy fiction such as Lord of the Rings, known for its underlying Christian themes. That’s the wonderful thing about fantasy worlds. One can imagine parallel societies, with different codes of behaviour and morality, perhaps where the Supreme Court is not at a pen stroke able to overrule democratic will and millennia of moral tradition.

For the time being, the Kingdom of God remains a fantasy world. Our job is to work toward bringing it about.