The decline of Western civilization from the Catholic order can be linked to a rejection of sacrifice. The rejection is clearly seen in the death cult surrounding contraception, abortion, and euthanasia, but it began with the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther and the other reformers rejected the Sacrifice of the Mass while purporting to keep core aspects of Christianity. They were good revolutionaries in this–such always keep a few principles while undercutting the rest. One principle Luther et al. undercut was the Cross, specifically the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary at every Mass. By limiting Christ’s Sacrifice to His historical act, Luther ritually locked it in the past, thereby removing the highest and best sacrifice possible, of God the Son to God the Father, from our everyday lives. Over time, this heresy attenuated the notion of sacrifice, and a death cult was the inevitable result. A non-sacrificial life is only a series of experiences which eventually end. Such an death is too horrible for a rational creature to bear. Anticipation of the horror often produces a nihilism which ironically drives its victims to anticipate the event itself.[1] Of the many ways death is anticipated in the United States, hospice care as sometimes practiced has achieved a surprising level of acceptance, even in the Catholic Church.
The lectures Luther delivered while still a Catholic do not read as particularly traditional. He could nevertheless address sacrifice without overtly attacking the Mass. In his course on Romans, for example, he denied that a “true sacrifice to God” is “something outside us or belonging to us.” The sacrifice is rather “we ourselves, forever, according to the statement in Ps. 110:4: ‘You are a priest forever,’ and hence He has an eternal priesthood.’”[2] A link still exists here between ourselves and Christ’s sacrifice, though the nature of the link and the respective roles seem confused.
Similarly, just after his break with Rome, Luther in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church could still acknowledge, “the common belief that the mass is a sacrifice, which is offered to God.” With seemingly solicitous concern, he went on to note: “Even the words of the canon seem to imply this,” as do “the sayings of the holy fathers, the great number of examples, and the widespread practice uniformly observed throughout the world.”[3] Against this tradition, however, Luther purported to array “the words and example of Christ” at the Last Supper, where “Christ did not offer himself to God the Father, nor did he perform a good work on behalf of others.”[4]
Luther thus separated Christ’s words and actions at the Last Supper from his sacrifice on Calvary the next day. As typical with revolutionaries, Luther simply asserted the point and moved on. But Christ Himself linked the events by saying at the Last Supper: “’Take and eat; this is my body,” and “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins.” Mt. 26:26-28. Also: “Amen I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” Mk. 14:25. And similarly: “Now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.” Jn. 16:28.
As one would expect, Luther’s initial expressions of concern for the “widespread practice uniformly observed throughout the world” quickly evolved into statements of contempt for the Catholic tradition. In The Misuse of the Mass, Luther scorned what he called “the popish mass with all its splendor,” saying “it is not, nor ever can be, a sacrifice.” “What else is this,” he asked “but creating a god after our own ideas . . . ?”[5] And in The Abomination of the Secret Mass, Luther claimed Catholics “shamelessly dare to blaspheme and insult the divine majesty every hour with their abominable masses and idolatries.”[6] The problem, he asserted in An Order of Mass and Communion,” is “the canon, that abominable concoction drawn from everyone’s sewer and cesspool. The mass became a sacrifice.”[7]
Luther could not logically reject the highest and best sacrifice available to man without rejecting sacrifice as a concept. His conceptual rejection was latent, but the premise eventually manifested itself. The cross in the West would soon appear without a corpus, ministry without celibacy, marriage without permanence, and, generally, justification without works.[8]
The sacrificial view of death was therefore abandoned by many Westerners. The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes what was lost: “What is essentially new about Christian death is this: through Baptism, the Christian has already ‘died with Christ’ sacramentally, in order to live a new life; and if we die in Christ’s grace, physical death completes this ‘dying with Christ’ and so completes our incorporation into him in his redeeming act.”[9] The catechism calls this the “positive meaning”[10] of death, but without incorporation into Christ’s own sacrifice, death would eventually become a pure negative, a mere cessation of life’s experiences.
As practiced in the United States, hospice care is sometimes a perfect expression of this anti-sacrificial ethos. For comparative purposes, consider the Catholic Church’s support for palliative care, which the catechism describes as follows:
“Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed either as an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable. Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged.”[11]
Each sentence of this quote is contradicted by hospice care as it is sometimes practiced in the United States. When death is thought imminent and a patient is unable to swallow, ordinary care may be interrupted by a refusal to provide hydration and nutrition through feeding tubes. The attendant suffering of the patient is putatively overcome by painkillers and doses of anti-anxiety medicine so high as to render the patient unconscious. The resulting death by dehydration and/or starvation is obviously willed as an end or a means.[12]
More significantly, the drugs may deprive the patient of a consciousness of death, the approach of which is the nihilist’s real terror, not physical pain. The nihilist’s deepest wish, conversely, is to enter what he or she considers nothingness without perceiving the “transition.” Catholics used to hold a crucifix before the face of a dying person to focus his or her thoughts on the sacrifice of Christ. Now our pedestrian nihilists think a dying person should have no thoughts at all. Some hospice workers will defend this as a kindness, but what it really signifies is their power to deal death. They may even assume a perverted sense of dignity from it–they are the masters of life or death and will provide either as asked.
One can also find in hospice care a lack of disinterested charity. A hospice organization is a money-making business, living off federal government payments. The laws in the United States are designed to reduce abuse, but the law can be worked around. Arrangements are made, patterns established, and you’ll find that people in this country sometimes have access to the sort of doctor- (or nurse-) assisted suicide common in other countries. The access is still de facto, not de jure, but try fighting a de facto arrangement supported by people who run the legal system. You’ll find it is essentially de jure, just in a de facto sort of way.
Finally, the encouragement properly given to palliative care is sometimes used to justify hospice care. But the philosophies can be very different, and in this writer’s opinion the leadership of the Catholic Church is paying too little attention to the difference. Providing sacraments to people about to kill themselves, or about to be killed by others, is not all the Church can do. She could warn the faithful away from hospice providers who do not accept our participation in Christ’s sacrifice. The fearful alternative is the “second death” about which St. John warned: “But as for cowards, the unfaithful, the depraved, murders, idol-worshipers, and deceivers of every kind, their lot is in the burning pool of fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” Jn. 21:8. Jesus Christ came to earth and willingly died an ignominious and painful death to redeem us from the second death. Let’s embrace His sacrifice and live it as He gives us the grace. Then we can be happy, even in death.
[1]Cf. Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, para. 15, 1995. Retrieved on May 12, 2026, from: https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html. (“In a social and cultural context which makes it more difficult to face and accept suffering, the temptation becomes all the greater to resolve the problem of suffering by eliminating it at the root, by hastening death so that it occurs at the moment considered most suitable.”)
[2][2] Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works, vol. 25, p. 435, ed. Hilton C. Oswald. Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, 1972.
[3] Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works, vol. 36, p. 51, ed. Abdel Ross Wentz. Muhlenberg Press, Philadelphia. 1959.
[4] Ibid, pp. 51-52.
[5] Ibid., p. 147.
[6] Ibid, p. 311.
[7] Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works, vol. 58, p. 21, ed. by Ulrich S. Leupold. Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1965.
[8] Justification would be imputed instead. See Cooper, Jordan. “A Lutheran Response to Justification: Five Views.” 2012.
[9] Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 1010. Catholic Book Publishing Co., New York, 1994.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., para 2279.
[12] See Address of John Paul II to the participants in the International Congress on “Life-sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas,” March 20, 2004. (“The sick person in a vegetative state, awaiting recovery or a natural end, still has the right to basic health care (nutrition, hydration, cleanliness, warmth, etc.), and to the prevention of complications related to his confinement to bed. He also has the right to appropriate rehabilitative care and to be monitored for clinical signs of eventual recovery.
I should like particularly to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act. Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory, insofar as and until it is seen to have attained its proper finality, which in the present case consists in providing nourishment to the patient and alleviation of his suffering.
The obligation to provide the “normal care due to the sick in such cases” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Iura et Bona, p. IV) includes, in fact, the use of nutrition and hydration (cf. Pontifical Council “Cor Unum”, Dans le Cadre, 2, 4, 4; Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, Charter of Health Care Workers, n. 120). The evaluation of probabilities, founded on waning hopes for recovery when the vegetative state is prolonged beyond a year, cannot ethically justify the cessation or interruption of minimal care for the patient, including nutrition and hydration. Death by starvation or dehydration is, in fact, the only possible outcome as a result of their withdrawal. In this sense it ends up becoming, if done knowingly and willingly, true and proper euthanasia by omission.
In this regard, I recall what I wrote in the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae, making it clear that “by euthanasia in the true and proper sense must be understood an action or omission which by its very nature and intention brings about death, with the purpose of eliminating all pain”; such an act is always “a serious violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person” (n. 65).
Besides, the moral principle is well known, according to which even the simple doubt of being in the presence of a living person already imposes the obligation of full respect and of abstaining from any act that aims at anticipating the person’s death.
Considerations about the “quality of life”, often actually dictated by psychological, social and economic pressures, cannot take precedence over general principles.
First of all, no evaluation of costs can outweigh the value of the fundamental good which we are trying to protect, that of human life. Moreover, to admit that decisions regarding man’s life can be based on the external acknowledgment of its quality, is the same as acknowledging that increasing and decreasing levels of quality of life, and therefore of human dignity, can be attributed from an external perspective to any subject, thus introducing into social relations a discriminatory and eugenic principle.
Moreover, it is not possible to rule out a priori that the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration, as reported by authoritative studies, is the source of considerable suffering for the sick person, even if we can see only the reactions at the level of the autonomic nervous system or of gestures. Modern clinical neurophysiology and neuro-imaging techniques, in fact, seem to point to the lasting quality in these patients of elementary forms of communication and analysis of stimuli.
However, it is not enough to reaffirm the general principle according to which the value of a man’s life cannot be made subordinate to any judgment of its quality expressed by other men; it is necessary to promote the taking of positive actions as a stand against pressures to withdraw hydration and nutrition as a way to put an end to the lives of these patients.”)