The Culture Of Life In Action

Jeanne at Body & Soul was kind enough to mention my post this week about Thomas Enders. She points out something I hadn't noticed: that Renato Martino, the presiding priest at Enders' funeral, recently was in the news saying this about Terri Schiavo:

"It is nothing else but murder," he said. "It is a victory of the culture of death over life. This is not a natural death, it is an imposed death."

Now, here's a famous quote from Father Daniel Santiago, an American Jesuit priest who spent many years in El Salvador and wrote a book called The Harvest of Justice. This is how Santiago described El Salvador during the eighties, the time Thomas Enders was Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs:

People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador; they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch.

Something strikes me as ironic about all this, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is.