By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture - Pope John Paul II was the great diagnostician of the “culture of death.” He showed us how the uglier trends in the Western world—the legalization of abortion, the breakdown in marriages, the trend toward euthanasia, the acceptance of aberrant sexuality—were produced by a steady erosion of respect for human life. By embracing contraception and divorce, our society first severed the link between sex and procreation, then invented the fiction that a permanent union can be broken without disastrous consequences.