by Stephen Kent

All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, is yet another way that Catholics are able to show our way to the world – by celebrating death.

This is indeed countercultural. In today’s climate, death is a situation to escape, a topic to be avoided.

All Souls’ Day is more than a piety. It is the public recognition that we not only accept death but welcome it as the inevitable end of our earthly pilgrimage.

Current culture does not agree. Consider the language used in obituaries in one edition of a daily newspaper:

“Valiant three-year battle with cancer.”

“Lost her courageous battle with cancer.”

“Lost his courageous fight with throat cancer.”

“Ending her long battle with Alzheimer’s.”

“Battle with cancer.”

“Fight against sarcoma.”

So we battle, fight and struggle, yet inevitably lose. Death is a failure. There is something off-putting about this language, as though the deceased are losers. If they had been stronger, the doctors better, the surgery successful, they would have lived.

The incessant attempt by human beings to achieve longevity, if not immortality, has been the topic of legend and amusement for centuries. Ponce de Leon searched the New World for the fountain of youth. Cryonics would place human remains in deep freeze until a cure can be found for what ailed the body. There have been pseudoscientific attempts to send human remains into outer space to await a more propitious time to return to Earth.

Such explorations do harm by advancing the concept that the human body is but one more machine. Science and medicine can medically (and morally) transplant organs from one human being to another. They can even substitute manufactured devices – artificial hearts, knees and hips – into the human body.

A quest for immortality, with science on its side, reduces the body to a machine, wonderfully designed by God but still in need of upgrading by humankind.

The human person, however, is created by God as body and soul and for this reason has a dignity that cannot be changed by anyone.

Death is inevitable, not to be feared by those who have faith in the purpose of creation and the goodness of its Creator.

Among that one day’s defeatist obituaries, one stood out for containing this thought: “He courageously won his three-year battle with esophageal cancer as his soul soared triumphantly to its heavenly home.”

It is good we have a commemoration of the departed and the opportunity to reflect upon our own inevitable end.[hr]

Kent is the retired editor of archdiocesan newspapers in Omaha and Seattle.