What will it take for a civilization slouching toward murder to reconsider, repent, renew a commitment to protecting human life?

In less than the less than three hours it took me to get from Moynihan Train Hall to Albany, N.Y., this morning, the British House of Commons voted in favor of assisted suicide, rejecting all kinds of warnings that should have stopped them in their tracks if they cared anything about human life.

So it was two hours ultimately for debate — not unlike the quick vote earlier in the week on abortion up to birth. Kim Leadbeater, the sponsor of the legislation, made a joke about the inevitability of death and taxes — I kid you not. One gets the impression she thinks she’s entertainment. Isn’t that what our politics is, after all? On a more serious note, other members pointed out — one with numbers from around the world — the dangers that assisted suicide pose to people with eating disorders.

Just last night I was talking with a woman who has lived the hell of anorexia. And she has fought through it — and still does — and is full of grace and inspiration for others. Having survived, she is making it her mission to help others, not just those who are suffering the same, but all who suffer.

Which is all of us.

To different degrees.

At different times.

We all suffer.

We are now increasingly deciding that our lives cease to have value when the suffering falls. With the up-until-birth abortions, the potential suffering of either mother or child — or both — can be factored in.

I’m now in Auriesville, N.Y., writing from a back room at the Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine, the national shrine of the North American martyrs. You know, Isaac Jogues who was tomahawked to death (after previously having fingers diced off) by the people he loved with a love beyond most of our understanding these days? I mean, what was Fr. Jogues thinking? Didn’t he know:

(a) to mind his own business and leave the Native American population alone with their brutal godlessness?

(b) he was going to get himself killed?

Of course, a Jesuit priest, Jogues longed for all to know the love of God and live in His tender mercy. So, yep, he ultimately got himself killed — for love of God and neighbor.

I sit here on the grounds where Fr. Jogues was killed — yards away from the likely spot — and I’m tempted to think we are the violent, pagan culture he ministered to and that killed him for it.

It’s not just London falling deeper into a culture of death. I passed the Empire State statehouse on the way here. They’ve embraced assisted suicide there too, also despite warnings and pleas from disabled people who expect to be eliminated for the sake of convenience under the delusion guise of some warped sense of mercy.

A friend of many of us, Dovie Eisner, is a month into a coma after being one of those voices, as one of his last acts before his voice was taken away from him was to oppose the assisted-suicide push in New York (his breathing tube became detached for a little too long). Not too far from here, J. J. Hanson once lived with his wife, Kristen, and their two sons — the second of whom exists only because they didn’t give up on J. J.’s life once he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He advocated against assisted suicide until his final days.

What will it take for a civilization slouching toward murder to reconsider, repent, renew a commitment to protecting human life — and stop encouraging even doctors to murder people? I’ve mentioned this here before, but Dr. Lydia Dugdale of Columbia Presbyterian, who also recently wrote in opposition to assisted suicide in the New York Times, shared while speaking on a panel in lower Manhattan earlier this month that the young nurses and doctors she trains increasingly — since Dobbs, especially — want to know why there is any stigma against any suicide.

I don’t know. But if Tertullian was right about the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the Church, we’ve got some martyrs here, and London does, as well. There’s one tree planted in memory of the Tyburn Martyrs. And, come up to Auriesville, especially if you’re anywhere in New York (or the N.Y. metro area — go see some of America not all that far away) — it’s beautiful and green right now, and amazingly powerful sacred ground.

I haven’t spent much time in England, and my anger at them at the moment may mean no speaking invites for the foreseeable future, but it is amazing to me that you can stand in the chaos of an evening commute by Hyde Park and look down and see a plaque and look over at a tree that remembers the Tyburn Martyrs. Killed for being Catholic, brutally, in what is now some of the heart of England. That’s a history that can’t go to waste. Right? Maybe this is the summer to get to know our respective martyrs better. For inspiration. For courage. For knowing what is actually worth living and dying for.

We need new life. And then to love and nourish and cherish and protect it.

That would be very different than the current trends.