Paul J. Griffiths critiques the common Catholic prayer for the defense of all human life “from conception to natural death” (“Against ‘Natural Death,’” Lent 2026). I must say that while Griffiths is right to hope for an end to the use of this hackneyed phrase in the Universal Prayer at Mass and at other times, to my mind, he is wrong about why.

Griffiths argues that this phrase should never be used because of how mistaken it is to think that any death may be called natural. To him, the death of the centenarian in his bed is no more natural than that of the innocent child who does not reach her first birthday. But if we follow the reasoning of the Angelic Doctor, among others, there is a sense in which death is natural to man.

Saint Thomas points out that something is called natural insofar as it proceeds from the natural principles of the thing. Man has two such principles of nature, matter and form, i.e., his body and his soul. Thomas draws a necessary distinction, saying that death may be called natural to man or not based on which principle is being discussed. Man’s form, his rational soul, is immortal, and so death is not natural to man with regard to his formal principle. When it comes to his body, however, his material principle, death is natural to man. Man’s body is necessarily corruptible, and the completion of that natural corruption is death. It was not by nature that man was preserved from death in the state of original justice, but by divine favor. Our original immortality was a preternatural gift rather than a natural endowment, a gift that was withdrawn from our first parents and their descendants because of original sin.

So I disagree with Griffiths on why we should avoid using this phrase, but I have long been of the same mind that it should not be used. The phrase seeks to express the fact that “unnatural” deaths, those that are brought about in particular by human choice, are an offense against human life. In praying for an end to all such offenses, we should pray, so the thinking goes, that deaths only be natural—in other words, to pray for an end to such “unnatural” deaths. Yet if we are praying for greater respect for the dignity of all human lives, that respect is irrespective of whether its end be “natural” or “unnatural.” We might as well pray for respect for human life from natural conception to natural death, since unnatural means of beginning a life are as morally illicit as unnatural means of ending it.

Griffiths’s suggestion of an intention “that the Lord might protect each of us so long as we live against any attempt to end our life by force” is a bit of a mouthful. Perhaps we can just pray for the protection of every human life from conception to death.

Father Jon Tveit
Washington, D.C.

The author replies:

I’m grateful to Father Tveit for his thoughtful letter. I’m glad that we agree on the conclusion, even if not on how to get there. I cordially (I hope) find obfuscatory the Thomist distinction between nature and grace as Tveit states it. The distinction he uses it to make is necessary, as he calls it, only if you begin from the grammar provided by the distinction itself, which I don’t and he shouldn’t. What reason is there to think that we were made mortal and then granted immortality by preternatural grace? Only a degraded Aristotelianism. Better to say what Augustine and most of the Fathers and Scripture all say frequently and with passion, which is that God has nothing to do with death, being a God of life, and therefore made nothing mortal. Saying that permits a clarity of perception and judgement about what death is and does that the nature/grace distinction as Tveit wields it (an ax, a cleaver, always violent) inevitably obscures. Thomism naturalizes death. Naturalizing death is incompatible with Christianity, which non-negotiably locates death as the principal effect of the Fall, angelic and human, which was itself not natural and prior to which there was no trace of or need for death in the created order. That rules out mortal unfallen natures, Deo gratias. I’d rather think as a Christian. I recommend it: It’s a lovely thing.