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This weekend, as Christians around the world commemorate the betrayal, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Terri Schiavo's body will begin to shut down. Her body will essentially mummify and bloat around her as she is deprived of water.

The Supreme Court said they wouldn't even listen to pleas to keep her alive.

Florida Judge George Greer said he won't listen to Gov. Jeb Bush's arguments for taking Schiavo into protective custody.

The Florida Senate turned down a law that would make it harder to kill Schiavo or for others whose death warrants are signed by mere hearsay.

President George Bush and Republican leaders of the U.S. Congress said they won't do any more, and that all legal options have been exhausted.

Police are arresting kids for trying to take Schiavo glasses of water. If Schiavo could drink the water, it would prove that she's not in a persistent vegetative state. If she couldn't, there's no harm.

"Growing up in the shadow of post-World War II America, and many remembrances of the Holocaust, I've often wondered what it must have been like in Nazi Germany for the nation to standby while evil was done in the name of kindness or eugenic ideology," says Touchstone's Ken Tanner. "Now we all know how it can happen, what it feels like, and how helpless good people can be in the face of intentional evil."

Around the office over the last few months, we've been talking about the supposed triumph of the evangelical movement. Evangelicalism is now the dominant face of American Christianity. Evangelical activist groups are credited as being the major power brokers in Washington. Newsweek's cover story speaks with an overwhelmingly orthodox voice supporting the doctrine of the Resurrection. If you believe New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, "We really are in a theocracy."

And yet our country's courts are supporting an adulterer to starve and dehydrate his wife to death while she lies helpless. And, apparently, she's aware of what's happening, if you believe the Mayo Clinic's William P. Cheshire Jr. But maybe you shouldn't, says The New York Times. After all, he's religious. "He has to be bogus, a pro-life fanatic," University of Minnesota Medical School neurologist Ronald Cranford told the Times.

And so, barring a miracle, Schiavo will be killed.

But that will not be the end of the story.

"Perhaps you've noticed other bloodless words being flipped at [Schiavo], words like 'viability' and phrases like 'pull the plug,'" writes the Chicago Tribune's John Kass. "These words were once the issue of bloodless people, of clerks and sophists who can prove almost anything with their fine arguments. The rest of us have fed on them until they shape how we think, shaping our options, shaping our future. … Americans have finally been taught to think like bureaucrats." The real word for what's happening, he says, is murder.

And it won't stop with Schiavo.

In its next term, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider Oregon's so-called "Death with Dignity Act."

In England, they're aborting 24-week-old babies because of cleft lips.

In the Netherlands, they're killing infants. Doctors there want to kill those who aren't even physically ill.

On Palm Sunday, things looked good for the culture of life, as the disciples saw it.

On Good Friday, things looked awfully bleak. The culture of death had triumphed. With Terri Schiavo, Jesus cried, "I thirst."

That, of course, is not the end of the Story. But it is the Story. And on Good Friday, there was nothing that anyone could do to turn back the culture of death. Not the disciples. Not Mary. Not Pilate. Not Herod.

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March (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49