A prayer of the faithful I often hear at Mass is for the protection of all human lives “from conception to natural death.” Hearing this makes me shiver in much the same way as would seeing someone pick up the ball and run with it during a game of soccer. It’s the “natural death” phrase that does it. Should I hear it to suggest that some deaths are just fine, and that we need no protection from those? That it’s only the unnatural ones that are a problem? That there are deaths proper to us, natural for us? The phrase is puzzling: It stands out as an intrusion not easily woven into the fabric of Catholic thought and practice. Worse: It’s an oxymoron. Death is exactly as natural to us as circularity is to squares.

There’s substantial magisterial weight behind this way of talking, however. It’s suggested for use in the prayers of the faithful by the U.S.C.C.B., and it occurs twice in the English version of John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium vitae—which is no doubt why the U.S.C.C.B. approves it. I’ll leave it to others who find such questions more interesting than I do to assess what weight that pedigree gives the phrase—though it’s interesting that the Catechism shows deep uneasiness about calling any death natural, and in the one place, paragraph 2319, where one might expect it to do so because it’s addressing the same questions that exercise John Paul II in Evangelium vitae, the Catechism is careful to avoid it, saying instead that “every human life, from the moment of conception until death, is sacred.” That’s right. Someone was staying awake.

Here I want modestly to express what theologians grandiosely call a dubium: a doubt as to whether we can ever properly call death natural. The doubt is, for me, undergirded by horror that we so often do call it that. Would we ever call torture compassionate or rape loving? No. To do so would be to show and contribute to conceptual and grammatical confusion. It’s the same with calling any death natural.

What we speak of when we speak of death is something that runs counter to everything we were made for. Death is the clearest evidence we have, so clear as to be almost unambiguous, that we’re damaged and that we live in a damaged world. The damage has its roots in the double Fall, of angels and ourselves, from which death flowed out like a dark tide rising. The LORD Who made us has nothing to do with death, did not make us for it, did not introduce it into the world, and has provided salvation from it. The first and last response of Catholics to every human death (and to the deaths of nonhumans, but that’s a longer story) is lament. Calling any death natural can’t be accommodated into this pattern of thought and speech and response. It makes a rent in that fabric, which is tightly woven, grave, sad, and beautiful. The more easily “from conception to natural death” comes to our minds and rolls from our tongues, the more tattered the fabric becomes.

Sometimes, not long after hearing this phrase at Mass, I walk through the columbarium that belongs to my parish and pray there for a while. I like the thought that it’s a dovecote, and I’ve bought a niche, so it’s likely that the incinerated remains of my flesh will one day be there, a day probably not too far off. The rules permit only name, birth date, and death date to be shown on the doors of the occupied niches, which is an excellent restriction; and as I walk I see niches where birth date and death date are the same, and others where they’re a hundred years apart. Could it be that the centenarians’ deaths are natural, while those of the newborns aren’t? No. It could not. Augustine writes, with admirable brevity and precision, “Finis autem vitae tam longam quam brevem vitam hoc idem facit.” They all, the old and the young, have come to the same end, and the end is horrible, unnatural, an offense and a disgrace, in the strict and proper sense of that last word. Deaths of senescence, by deliberate violence, when young, when old, from illness, by accident, in bed, on the street, on the battlefield, in childbirth, in the womb: Each is an inexpressibly dreadful calvary, and none is, as death, better or worse than any other, more or less natural, more or less to be lamented. Any way of talking, such as calling some deaths natural and others unnatural, that encourages us to think and act as if it were otherwise is revolting.

It’s commonplace, you’ll say, for our secular law codes and medical practices to distinguish deaths by natural causes from those by unnatural causes. And yes, it is commonplace. Such distinctions are rough-and-ready (it isn’t possible to give them a tight definition), and making them can help doctors and lawyers decide when a particular death demands an arrest, an autopsy, or an inquest and when it needs only a sigh and a burial without further formalities. Often, in such contexts, calling a death natural means something like a death whose only causes are internal to the one who died: a heart attack, a brain aneurysm, and so on. Then calling a death unnatural or accidental indicates action from without: a bullet, an avalanche, or the like. But these are not our concerns. And if, as is likely, it’s from such sources that calling some deaths natural has insinuated itself into Catholic prayer, then becoming aware of this should make us uneasy.

You may also say, But we do lament the death of a child more, or at least differently, than we do the death of an old person full of years. The latter has had a life, done what we’re here to do, while the former hasn’t, has died before having a chance. What’s wrong with taking the one kind of death to be more lamentable than the other? It’s of course true that there’s a strong tendency to act in that way, among Catholics as well as others. Were the devil to quote Scripture on this he would say, “Dies annorum nostrorum sunt septuaginta anni / aut in valentibus octoginta anni,” and would no doubt say, That’s what we mean by a natural death: one that happens after seventy or eighty years of life. The deaths of children and those inflicted in the prime of life by violence or illness or the like are the unnatural ones. They’re the deaths that people need protection from, not the natural ones.

To which we should say, Vade, Satanas! That pattern of response confuses what’s good for a human person with what’s normal for a damaged organism. Yes, as the organisms we are we have a lifespan, and yes, it’s ordinarily seventy or eighty years. But that doesn’t at all suggest that such a lifespan is natural to us as human persons. Universality doesn’t yield naturalness. Sin is universal among us. Does that make it natural to us? It does not. It, like death, and in intimate embrace with it, is lamentable damage. We might call blindness or stupidity or envy natural were they universal, but that wouldn’t make them so. The error here is to subsume what’s proper to us and good for us as persons into what’s inevitable for us as organisms in a devastated world, a world of universal death. We have no need to do that.

It’s clear that some deaths involve much pain, while others are free from it. Some are sudden, so much so that they can’t be anticipated or prepared for, while others approach slowly and with increasingly threatening obviousness. Some happen to those with extensive responsibilities to the living, and others to those with none. Some are of people whom millions mourn, and others of people whose deaths no one notices. These are weighty differences, and they do and should bring with them different patterns of response by the living. But the differences have to do with death’s ancillaries and acolytes, not with the thing itself; and that thing, that “distinguished thing,” as Henry James elegantly called it as it came for him, isn’t made more or less natural, more or less lamentable, because of its ancillaries. Just as the pains undergone by a good man aren’t, as pains, discriminable from those undergone by a bad man—which is among the reasons why torture is wrong no matter to whom it’s done. Mention of death’s ancillaries and acolytes, Deo gratias, is banished from my parish’s columbarium niches. All that matters, and all that’s shown there, is that you lived and you died, and what the space of time between those two events was.

And so, once again: Death is never natural; it’s always the same, always an event that doesn’t belong to life and isn’t lived through, always lamentable. That’s how we talk; that’s the game we play; that’s the way it is. Why then do we say this prayer? And why has the slogan “from conception to natural death” entered so deeply and broadly into the ambient culture that it has become a mark or sign of Catholicism? A full answer to that is beyond my scope and concern here, as well as beyond my interest. All I’ll say about it is that the pairing of natural death with conception suggests that we’re dealing with a pair of concerns, one having to do with people who live in the womb and might be killed there and the other having to do with people whose deaths by senescence or from illness are approaching and might have them hastened by some violent intervention. I respect those concerns, as you also should. But use of the modifier natural isn’t required to bring them into the light.

Suppose that instead of asking the LORD for the protection of human life from conception to natural death we were to ask more chastely and simply that the LORD might protect each of us so long as we live against any attempt to end our life by force. That is beautiful and simple and concordant with Catholic faith and practice. It doesn’t malform us. It underscores death’s dreadfulness. It loses nothing. And if we want a rationale for it, we can say what the Catechism says, which is that every life is sacred from conception until death—not until natural death.

Here again is the fundamental concern. The only thing that can reasonably be said to come to, or to have, a natural death is a damaged organism. Natural then means something close to “inevitable as things stand.” It belongs to the deep grammar of Catholicism, and perhaps of Christianity more broadly, to call into question any simple identification of the interests and needs of the mortal, damaged organism as it exists now with the needs and interests of the persons, the imagines Dei, we are. Whence, among the lovelinesses of our long tradition, celibacy, fasting, silence, solitude, poverty, martyrdom, and so on. All those, and many more, are scripts that overwrite, without erasing, the needs and concerns of the damaged organism. Calling some deaths natural begins to dissolve that tension and the possibility of that overwriting. We don’t need to speak in that way. We could stop.