The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death

Photo by BAILEY MAHON on Unsplash

P. A. Ritzer, Volume 31

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

And if Tucker Carlson does not yet recognize perhaps the deepest and broadest root of the culture of death grown from a seed of diabolical origin, I think he is getting closer to it. That root is pervasive and subtle and oh so easy and something that far too many people will skirt around or go over, because they will not choose to accept the implications it has for the way they live their lives. But if we are going to free ourselves from the culture of death, we have got to face it. The root is contraception. Once a culture accepts contraception, artificial birth control, the seeds of so much of the horror of the culture of death are sown.

Saint Paul VI warned of the consequences of contraception like infidelity, lowering of moral standards, reducing women to “a mere instrument for the satisfaction” of men’s desires. He wrote in Humanae Vitae:

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.^¹

Do we not have enough evidence of that final point in our present culture? It makes me think of a friend who told me that in her mother’s bridge club, in the 1950s or 60s, a woman admitted to taking the pill, and when the other women questioned why she would do so, she said of her husband, “When he wants it, he gets it.” The friend’s mother observed that, right before their eyes, their friend had been reduced to a sexual object. As a priest said to me over forty years ago, “Too many men treat women as masturbatory tools.” How well does the condom fit into that description. And how willingly do women desperate for love allow themselves to be so used, which does not sate but rather increases their desperation for love. How much mental illness can be attributed to the abuse of God’s profound gifts of sexuality and fertility? And how much damage is done to our culture, how toxic do we make it, by our refusal to accept the responsibility of sexuality, fertility, and the Sacrament of Matrimony?

And you know, on television, film, and internet—whether in dramas, real-life interviews, or other fare a husband is subjected to—I have seen many times where women, in twos or threes or larger groups, sit around and sip their wine and gripe about men. And it dawned on me that my mother and the other mothers of large families that we knew did not gather and complain about their husbands as clueless Neanderthals. These women spoke of their husbands as committed lifelong partners in the challenge of life in the world, which involved marriage, children, home, church, work, and whatever leisure activities they might squeeze in with husbands and kids. That is also true of family women of our generation. And it is true of the men of the relationships.

It would never have occurred to them that the goal of life was a succession of candlelit wine-drenched gourmet dinners—with some washed and coiffed metrosexual as fashionably dressed in the latest male attire as the washed, coiffed, and painted female in her short tight dress and spike heels—mere preludes to the endless vacations on sunlit exotic beaches, all of it laced with sterile desperate fornication that in reality communicates to the man and woman a profound rejection of each other, children, family, and God, and sexuality itself, (not to mention commitment and future), and is so satisfying that the women afterward sit around with their friends and complain about the men, while the men move on to other easy marks who will sleep with them without the grace and responsibility of marriage. How special can they feel in such relationships, men and women, to know that they are just the next in line to engage in the most physically intimate human act stripped of its deepest purpose and meaning? Apparently, given their grousing, not very. Sue Ellen Browder’s Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement is instructive in this area.²

I remember in the 1990s, at the parish where I was involved in the Millennium Evangelization Project, I was talking after Mass to a woman who was quite active in the pro-life movement, serving as a sidewalk counselor in front of an abortion clinic. We were talking of the evil of abortion when I said that I was ever more convinced that the root of the evil was contraception. She responded, “You don’t have to tell me.” Then she proceeded to tell me that her husband had got a vasectomy without consulting her, and thereafter one evil after another was visited upon their family. It began with his infidelity and culminated in her own pro-life daughter getting an abortion, from which she had still not recovered. The husband eventually repented and joined her in her pro-life work. That is not the only time I have heard of a vasectomy leading to infidelity and, often enough, the destruction of a family.

And let’s just consider that for a moment. This is not to point fingers, or to seek to know about any personal behavior, but just to take an objective look at the practice. Step out of what we have got used to accepting and really consider it. Men have their bodies mutilated in an attempt to prevent the sexual act from doing what nature and nature’s God intended it to do. And women do it too. How unnatural is that? How does that fit into God’s plan? And think of any kind of contraceptive. They all relegate sexuality to the mechanistic thinking that begets the mass formation and totalitarianism that Mattias Desmet warns about in The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

Contraception invites Big Pharma and manufacturing companies and a host of other soulless actors into the intimacy of the sexual act, placing commercial artificial barriers between the man and woman and in the way of what God intended for the act. How does it fit into God’s plan, or just into nature, that people visit a public store and purchase an unnatural product in front of the whole world to take home and shove between oneself and one’s partner, literally into the woman’s body, to pervert the intimacy and dignity and fecundity of the most intimate act? Think of all the money these soulless actors are making off dehumanizing your intimacy and off your decision to prevent or abort your children. Yes, some forms of artificial birth control act as abortifacients. And how easily is abortion justified in a culture that has repudiated chastity and reduced sexual responsibility to taking a pill or using a device to prevent the natural result of sexual relations. How much easier does that make it to then dispatch the “unintended” baby.

Why would human beings, endowed with a supernatural destiny, allow the barren, elitist, globalist purveyors of the culture of death to impose their Malthusian belts on them to strip their sexuality from its deepest meaning and reduce it to mindless sterile pleasure devoid of the children with which God may have graced husband and wife and the whole world. Why would they allow the elite to sucker them out of their greatest legacy: children formed from their own bodies, man and wife, and animated with eternal souls, and then grandchildren, and on and on. Bigger houses, nicer cars or trucks, or vacation cruises will never fill the void left by the children they did not bring into the world and raise. Family is not meant to be something one adds on for personal enhancement to one’s career. As Phillip Sloan put it: “Should the careerist choose love, he would cease to be a careerist.” Work supports the family and is subservient to it. Professor Desmet observes:

The rise of meaningless professions shows us that the real problem of humanity lies in human relationships, more so than in the struggle with natural forces or in the physical demands of work. Simply put, in a society in which human relationships are satisfying, life will be bearable even if it has only primitive means of production. Whereas in a society where human relationships are impoverished and toxic, life will be difficult and unbearable, however “advanced” such society may be in terms of mechanical-technical evolutions.³

And without going into detail, considering all the various forms of artificial birth control, how do they in any way reflect the dignity of man and woman and the gift of sexuality and its purpose to create trinitarian communions of man, woman, and God; and man, woman, and child? How bad would it really be to welcome an “unplanned” child and to offer all involved the sacrificial love that is exemplified on the Cross? I remember one story in particular of a couple who, when a crisis hit their family and they were tempted to despair, they took solace in each other’s arms only to conceive their tenth child, who was thereafter a living reminder of their love in times of difficulty.

That is an example of true love, unitive and procreatvie. As Christ himself taught, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”⁴ Love in the Sacrament of Matrimony is: I give myself to you because I am laying down my life for you and those our love will bring into the world. Yes, those our love will bring into the world. After the example of Jesus, who better exemplifies laying down her life for a friend than the pregnant mother, epitomized in the example of Mary, the mother of Jesus? And in authentic matrimony the husband and wife are true friends, not adversaries who resent each other and their desire for each other and their rejection of each other.

On the other hand, if we go back to the Bill Maher statement that, with eight billion people on the earth, he will not miss the aborted, contraception, of course, fits right in with that. One of the lies of contraception is that we will not miss the unconceived. Contraception allows one to engage in the act that is supposed to be a giving of self in a profound union with God, spouse, and child thus conceived and turns it into a sterile, selfish taking that does not fulfill but rather depletes and leaves the barren man and woman desperately wanting.

Where contraception, due to ignorance, is not a complete failure to love, it is at least a contraction of love. That failure or contraction results in using the other for one’s pleasure and refusing the child that ought to result from the act. It says, “I want you because you make me feel good” not “I give myself to you, in the Sacrament of Matrimony, because I am laying down my life for you and our children.” It is profoundly selfish and stingy, the ultimate in taking and not sharing. And that failure to love or contraction of love, that selfishness, is contagious. It is passed on to the children that live within the relationship. And it is passed on to others within the culture.

A memory stirs of a visit to a doctor for a check-up at an ivy-league school decades ago. I remember him to be older, maybe in his fifties if not sixties, and he seemed uncomfortable and furtive from the very beginning. He asked me about my family based on the form I had filled out that listed my six siblings. It seemed that something was bothering him and that he was being devious about it. Finally, without looking at me, and in a sneaky way that felt like he was trying to elicit a certain answer or maybe some kind of justification, he said that growing up in a family that large I must not have got much attention. The guile all but dripped from his question, and I would not be manipulated; so I told him truthfully that in a family that large, all you got was attention; from waking up to going to sleep, all you got was attention. His discomfort was palpable, and I just could not help feeling that there was something deeply unsettled in his soul regarding the matter of life.

In that light, I would sometimes hear people ask how we or others could have so many children in our family. How did we afford it? That is funny because I never heard my parents mention anything to do with the monetary cost of having children. They were just open to whatever children were given them and committed to providing for them however they could. Nor do I remember anyone from large families in those days ever mentioning the monetary cost of having and raising children. On the other hand, I have heard people with smaller families raise the matter of the monetary cost of having and raising children: “How can they afford to have that many kids?” “They must be rich to have so many kids.” Rich, all right, but not necessarily in money.

And that is where we will wrap up Part Eight. Part Nine should follow shortly.

Thank you,

P. A. Ritzer

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©2025 P. A. Ritzer

1. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Vatican: The Holy See, 25 July 1968), 17, accessed 31 December 2024, https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html..

2. Sue Ellen Browder, Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Woman’s Movement (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015).

3. Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2022), 31.

4. Jn 15:13, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, RSV, Second Catholic Edition (2010).