The Last Enemy

Part 1 of the forty-post series “Memento Mori — Death: A Catholic Perspective.”

On the second day of November the Church turned her whole attention to the dead, and through this month she keeps it there. Pope Leo XIV, speaking about death at a general audience last December, said that it “seems to be the most natural and at the same time most unnatural event that exists.” It is natural, he said, “because every living being on earth dies.” It is unnatural “because the desire for life and eternity that we all feel for ourselves and for the people we love makes us see death as a sentence, as a ‘contradiction’.”

Both halves of that sentence are Catholic teaching. The world around us keeps only the first, and treats death as the ordinary end of a biological process, regrettable and inevitable. The Church has never been willing to say that death is merely natural, and her reasons have to do with what a human being is.

What death is

The definition is old, and the Church shares it with ancient philosophy. The Catechism states it briefly: “In that ‘departure’ which is death the soul is separated from the body. It will be reunited with the body on the day of resurrection of the dead” (n. 1005). St. Augustine, writing of the death of the body, calls it “the separation of the soul from the body” (City of God XIII.6).

Plato had said as much four centuries before Christ. In the Phaedo, Socrates asks whether death is not “the separation of the soul from the body,” and his friend agrees. On the bare definition the philosopher and the Church agree; on what it means, as will appear, they do not.

Natural, in a sense

The Church does not deny the biology. “In a sense bodily death is natural,” the Catechism says, “but for faith it is in fact ‘the wages of sin’” (n. 1006). St. Thomas Aquinas worked out the distinction carefully. A human being is made of matter, and matter left to itself breaks down. But the form of a human being is a rational soul, and the soul does not break down. So, he concludes, “man is naturally corruptible as regards the nature of his matter left to itself, but not as regards the nature of his form” (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, a. 6).

He illustrates the point with a craftsman. A smith chooses iron for a blade because it is hard; that it also rusts is a defect of the material, not something he wanted. In the same way, the body’s liability to decay “is due to a condition of matter, and is not chosen by nature: indeed nature would choose an incorruptible matter if it could.”

The modern objection runs that every organism dies and that death is simply how living things work. The Church does not teach that Adam’s body was deathless by its own biology. Aquinas says that man’s body in the beginning was indissoluble “not by reason of any intrinsic vigor of immortality, but by reason of a supernatural force given by God to the soul,” and that this power “was not natural to the soul, but was the gift of grace” (I, q. 97, a. 1). The Catechism puts it in modern words: “Even though man’s nature is mortal God had destined him not to die” (n. 1008). Death belongs to the dust we are made of. It does not belong to the whole man, and it is not what God made him for.

A wound, not a release

For the Platonic tradition, the separation of soul from body was a liberation. The Phaedo reports a doctrine “taught in secret” that “we men are in a kind of prison,” and Socrates describes the true philosophers as men who “practice dying” and who “desire to have the soul apart by itself alone.” That instinct survives at many funerals, whenever the body in the coffin is spoken of as only a shell, as though the person had at last escaped it.

The Christian view is that the separation is a wound. Aquinas, commenting on St. Paul, writes that the soul “is naturally united to the body, and is separated from it against its nature” (contra suam naturam), and that the soul without its body is incomplete. He makes the point while showing why the resurrection matters: if only the soul were saved, man’s natural desire for the salvation of his whole self would be frustrated, for anima mea non est ego, “my soul is not I” (Super I ad Corinthios 15, lect. 2). The souls of the blessed already see God; the Church defined in 1336 that they are “truly blessed and have eternal life and rest” before the resurrection. Yet even they await it, because a man is both body and soul.

St. Paul could write that he had “a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, a thing by far the better” (Philippians 1:23), and some read that as the Platonic hope. But what Paul longed for was Christ, not the loss of his body. Elsewhere he says so directly: “For we also, who are in this tabernacle, do groan, being burthened; because we would not be unclothed, but clothed upon, that that which is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4). Augustine, answering the philosophers who mocked Christians for calling the separation of soul and body a punishment, drew the same line: “it is not the body, but the corruptibility of the body, which is a burden to the soul” (City of God XIII.16).

Christians have never pretended that the separation itself is gentle. Augustine describes “the very violence with which body and soul are wrenched asunder, which in the living had been conjoined and closely intertwined,” and calls it “a harsh experience, jarring horridly on nature so long as it continues” (XIII.6). Aquinas counts death “the most fearful of all bodily evils.” Scripture does not soften it: “O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that hath peace in his possessions!” (Ecclesiasticus 41:1).

How death entered

If death is not what God made man for, it came from somewhere. The first warning is in Genesis: “For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death” (Genesis 2:17). “For God made not death, neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living” (Wisdom 1:13). “For God created man incorruptible, and to the image of his own likeness he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death came into the world” (Wisdom 2:23–24). St. Paul gives the line of descent: “as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). And the verdict: “the wages of sin is death. But the grace of God, life everlasting, in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

In 418 a council at Carthage, whose canons the standard collections record as approved by Pope Zosimus, condemned the claim that Adam was created mortal in such a way that he would have died whether he sinned or not. The Council of Trent, in its decree on original sin, taught that Adam by his transgression incurred “the wrath and indignation of God, and consequently death, with which God had previously threatened him” (Session V, canon 1). The Catechism quotes the Second Vatican Council: “Bodily death, from which man would have been immune had he not sinned” is thus “the last enemy” of man left to be conquered (n. 1008).

The phrase comes from St. Paul. The Douay-Rheims renders 1 Corinthians 15:26 as “And the enemy death shall be destroyed last.” The Latin of the Vulgate keeps the order that gives this post its title: Novissima autem inimica destruetur mors, the last enemy, death, shall be destroyed.

St. Ambrose, preaching at his brother’s grave a week after the funeral, said that “death was no part of man’s nature, but became natural; for God did not institute death at first, but gave it as a remedy,” so “that an end should be set to the evils.” For, he adds, “immortality, unless grace breathed upon it, would be rather a burden than an advantage” (On the Death of Satyrus II.47). Pope Benedict XVI cited that passage in Spe Salvi as an ancient voice for a modern unease: that to continue living for ever, endlessly, “appears more like a curse than a gift” (n. 10). Benedict enters a caution of his own before drawing on it: “Whatever precisely Saint Ambrose may have meant by these words” (n. 11). His answer is that “eternal life” is an inadequate term for what we truly long for, which is not “an unending succession of days in the calendar” (nn. 11–12).

What Christ did to death

Christ entered death Himself. “Therefore because the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner hath been partaker of the same: that, through death, he might destroy him who had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil: And might deliver them, who through the fear of death were all their lifetime subject to servitude” (Hebrews 2:14–15). St. Paul can therefore say that our Saviour “hath destroyed death” (2 Timothy 1:10), while also saying that death “shall be destroyed last.” Its power over us is already broken; its final destruction waits for the resurrection of the body.

St. Athanasius described the change in the fourth century: “before the divine sojourn of the Saviour took place, even to the saints death was terrible, and all wept for the dead as though they perished. But now that the Saviour has raised His body, death is no longer terrible” (On the Incarnation 27). He did not pretend the fear had vanished. “Man is by nature afraid of death and of the dissolution of the body,” he wrote; what is startling is that he who has put on the faith of the Cross “despises even what is naturally fearful” (28).

Why, then, do the baptized still die, when the sin that brought death has been forgiven? Augustine answers that the penalty has been put to a new use: “For then it was proclaimed to man, If you sin, you shall die; now it is said to the martyr, Die, that you sin not” (City of God XIII.4). The Church has long called the day of a saint’s death his natalis, his birthday, and the traditional Roman Martyrology uses the word for martyrs and confessors alike: St. Titus, who was not a martyr, is entered In Creta natalis sancti Titi. St. Ambrose wrote that “the death itself of the martyrs is the prize of their life” (II.45). The Catechism quotes St. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to the wild beasts at Rome: “It is better for me to die in (eis) Christ Jesus than to reign over the ends of the earth” (n. 1010).

Remember your last end

A Church that believes all this does not avoid the subject. “In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Ecclesiasticus 7:40). The Latin, memorare novissima tua, gave the tradition its name for the Four Last Things: death, judgment, hell and heaven. This series begins with the first of them and follows the soul’s road from the deathbed to the Last Day.

The discipline is written into the Church’s rules and rites. Among the instruments of good works, the Rule of St. Benedict lists mortem cotidie ante oculos suspectam habere: to keep death daily before one’s eyes, as something to watch for (ch. 4). On Ash Wednesday the priest traces the cross on the forehead with words taken from Genesis: Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and into dust thou shalt return.” Caravaggio painted St. Jerome writing with a skull at his elbow, and Zurbarán painted St. Francis contemplating one.

The purpose is to live well. The Catechism says that the prospect of death “lends urgency to our lives: remembering our mortality helps us realize that we have only a limited time in which to bring our lives to fulfillment” (n. 1007). Pope Leo, recalling St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Preparation for Death, said that death “can be a great teacher of life,” because to reflect on it “teaches us to choose what we really want to make of our existence.”

The death we hide

Our own age has taken the opposite course. “Death seems to be a sort of taboo,” Pope Leo said, “an event to keep at a distance; something to be spoken of in hushed tones, to avoid disturbing our sensibilities and our tranquillity. This is often why we avoid visiting cemeteries, where those who have gone before us rest as they await resurrection.”

In 1955 the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer published an essay called “The Pornography of Death,” arguing that death had become the unmentionable subject that sex had once been, hidden from view and replaced by fantasy. Gorer connected the change, in England at least, to the decline of belief in the future life as Christian doctrine teaches it, and quoted St. Paul on the body “sown in corruption” and “raised in incorruption.” Without some such belief, he argued, natural death and decay become too horrible to contemplate.

The move of death out of the home was already under way. In the United States, by the Institute of Medicine’s figures, about half of all deaths in 1949 took place in institutions, and by 1980 nearly three in four did. The trend has partly reversed since; in 2018, 35 per cent of American deaths took place in hospitals and 31 per cent at home. Cremation, forbidden to Catholics until 1963 and now permitted under conditions that a later post in this series takes up, has become the majority practice in the country as a whole, above 60 per cent of deaths by the provisional figures for 2025.

Pope Leo named the transhumanist hope of endless earthly life and asked the obvious question: “Could death really be defeated by science? But then, could science itself guarantee us that a life without death is also a happy life?” The Council had answered it sixty years earlier: “All the endeavors of technology, though useful in the extreme, cannot calm his anxiety; for prolongation of biological life is unable to satisfy that desire for higher life which is inescapably lodged in his breast” (Gaudium et Spes 18).

All Souls

The Church answers death with a commemoration, a whole day of prayer for those who have gone before us. She prays for them because they are not gone, and because, as the Catechism teaches, “all who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven” (n. 1030). The Church calls that purification Purgatory, and she has always held that the living can help the dead in it by prayer and above all by the Holy Sacrifice. A later post in this series takes up what happens in the moment after death; an earlier post, Where Did the Requiem Go?, asks what became of the Mass the Church once offered for them.

Since 1919 the Roman Missal has carried a preface for Masses for the dead with a line that states the Christian hope: Tuis enim fidelibus, Domine, vita mutatur, non tollitur, “for to Thy faithful, O Lord, life is changed, not taken away.” Pope Leo, celebrating All Souls at the Verano cemetery last year, said of the Lord: “He will destroy death forever. Indeed, he has already conquered it, opening for us the way to eternal life by passing through the valley of death during his Paschal mystery.”

Death remains an enemy, the last one, and its defeat has already begun. “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? Now the sting of death is sin: and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who hath given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:55–57).

A note from Domus Dei. This series is published in memory of Michael — co-founder of this apostolate, who gave it its name, and who died on August 3 of this year. November 2026 is our first All Souls without him. I, the writer, miss him dearly. This series on death will be accompanied by a sister series on grief — grief I am, at this time, deeply in the middle of.

Everything in these forty posts was written by men who expected to be prayed for when they died. Reader, pray for him.

The series “Memento Mori — Death: A Catholic Perspective” runs to forty posts in five octaves: Facing Death, The Art of Dying, Judgment and the World to Come, The Body and the Resurrection, and How the Church Buries Her Dead. Its keystones are 1. The Last Enemy · 16. Go Forth, Christian Soul · 17. And After This the Judgment · 25. I Look for the Resurrection of the Dead · 38. Dies Irae and Memory Eternal.

References

1. Scripture from the Douay-Rheims Bible, drbo.org: Genesis 2:17, 3:19; Wisdom 1:13, 2:23–24; Romans 5:12, 6:23; 1 Corinthians 15:26, 55–57; 2 Corinthians 5:4; Philippians 1:23; 2 Timothy 1:10; Hebrews 2:14–15; Ecclesiasticus 7:40, 41:1. Vulgate from drbo.org/lvb.
2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1005–1010; nn. 1030, 1032.
3. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965), n. 18.
4. Council of Trent, Session V, Decree on Original Sin, canon 1, in the translation of J. Waterworth (1848), papalencyclicals.net, and Session XXV, Decree concerning Purgatory; Council of Carthage (418), canon 1, in Denzinger (30th ed.), n. 101.
5. Benedict XII, Benedictus Deus (1336).
6. Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), nn. 10–12.
7. Leo XIV, General Audience of 10 December 2025; Homily for the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (2 November 2025).
8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 85, aa. 5–6, I, q. 97, a. 1 and II-II, q. 123, a. 4 (English Dominican translation, 1920); Super I ad Corinthios, cap. 15, lect. 2, corpusthomisticum.org (translation ours).
9. Augustine, City of God, XIII.4, 6, 16 (trans. M. Dods).
10. Ambrose, On the Death of Satyrus, II.45, 47 (NPNF).
11. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 27–28 (NPNF).
12. Plato, Phaedo 62b, 64c, 67e, trans. H. N. Fowler (Loeb, 1914), Perseus.
13. Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 4, The Latin Library (translation ours); Martyrologium Romanum (traditional edition), 4 January, liturgialatina.org.
14. Sacred Congregation of Rites, decree of 9 April 1919 on the Preface for the Dead, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 11 (1919), p. 190 (translation ours); Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ad resurgendum cum Christo (2016), on the 1963 instruction Piam et constantem; 1917 Code of Canon Law, can. 1203 §1: Fidelium defunctorum corpora sepelienda sunt, reprobata eorundem crematione.
15. Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, Galleria Borghese, Rome; Francisco de Zurbarán, St. Francis Contemplating a Skull, Saint Louis Art Museum. Both public domain.
16. Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” Encounter, October 1955, pp. 49–52.
17. Institute of Medicine, Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life (1997), ch. 2; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, QuickStats: place of death, 2000–2018 (MMWR 69/19, 2020); Cremation Association of North America, industry statistics (2025 figures provisional).