Few would ever fault Canada’s Catholic bishops for expressing themselves with an excess of poetry. Yet their document on the 10th anniversary of MAiD in Canada deserves comparison with T.S. Eliot.

Eliot, of course, is popularly known for his poem “The Wasteland,” and the bishops effectively echo his identification and ultimate rejection of the, well, moral and spiritual wasteland that characterized his post-First World War Europe and our era of homicide as public health care.

There’s also a flash in the bishop’s letter of Eliot’s famous getaway line in “The Hollow Men”: “This is how the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper.” The pastors of Canada’s Catholics are, we might say, filled with quiet defiance that the world cannot end that way because faith in the Resurrected Christ does not permit it.

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“As disciples of Christ, we affirm that every human life is a gift, holds profound dignity and value and is part of a human community (cf. Mt 25:31-46). In contrast, euthanasia and assisted suicide, whatever their motives or means, consist in intentionally causing or hastening the death of a person who is sick, suffering, disabled or dying in order to eliminate suffering,” the bishops write. “Such acts…are gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to God, the Creator and Lord of life.”

God, the Creator and Lord of life. There’s an indisputable rhythmic grace in those words, particularly in their service of rhetoric opposing the macabre ineptness of sticking poisoned needles in the arms of the sick and dying to “aid” them medically.

In such rhetoric, the comparison with Eliot is most apropos. Among the greatest poets of the 20th century, he was also a masterful essayist. His words of comfort for those who ceaselessly struggle against crude utilitarianism stand well beside the bishops’ unflagging opposition to a decade of MAiD madness.

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” Eliot wrote. “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive….”

The bishops’ reflect the enduring optimism and realism of those words with their stated conviction that MAiD, even after causing an estimated 100,000 Canadian deaths, can never be acquiesced to simply because a confused and cowardly Parliament proclaimed it as law in 2016.

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“Such acts can never be morally acceptable,” they write. “True compassion does not answer suffering with death.”

Never give in to the morally unacceptable, in other words. Never give in to those who would make death itself triumphant. Never despair of “victory” in our time when we already have won victory in Christ.

Not that we should disregard wins in the secular world when and if they come even though, in Eliot’s words, such successes have a time stamp on them as the enemies of life push back. A case in point is the favourable legal decision achieved by Canada’s leading pro-life organization in an Ontario court earlier this month.

Campaign Life Coalition scored a significant advance when the Ontario Superior Court ruled its Charter rights were violated by the Parliament Hill security service during the 2023 March for Life. 

Campaign Life was prohibited from displaying signs that graphically showed what happens to an unborn child during an abortion. Mr. Justice Calum MacLeod ruled the prohibition was an unreasonable breach of constitutionally-protected free speech. 

“There is no doubt that the images were graphic, bloody and disturbing. That is their point,” Justice MacLeod wrote with almost poetic succinctness. “The point of the message is to sway public opinion and to express the point of view that abortion is a form of murder because in the view of the Applicants, human life — and human rights — begin at the point of conception.”

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Campaign Life, he emphasized, is constitutionally entitled to hold that view — and most importantly express it — though many Canadians disagree with it and might find the means of expression repulsive. 

There is more here than a victory for free speech. As with the bishops’ statement on the 10th anniversary of turning our hospitals into killing fields, Campaign Life’s fruitful legal fight reminds us that our cause can never be lost because we have been gained in Christ.