Monday, February 1, 2010

James Carroll on John Paul II re: Culture of Death

James Carroll, Practicing Catholic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009):
Under its sweeping rubric "culture of death," the encyclical (Evangelium vitae) effectively equated genocidal murderers and couples using birth control, state executioners administering lethal doses of poison and genetic scientists inventing reproductive technologies.  The divorced, the gay and lesbian, the bisexual and transgendered, the boys who masturbate, the thinkers who defend notions of relativism, the pluralists—such were the citizens of the culture of death.  The Manichean divide embodied in the cultures of death and life boiled down to the distinction between the fallen world and pope-obeying Catholicism (p. 246).

The graphic is Joachim Jean Cosson and Joseph Burn-Smeeton's "Good in the Form of God and Evil in the Form of the Devil Are Present the World Over,"  depicting the Manichean worldview.