Having embraced the culture of death, Canada is dying, as it deserves to do.

The dying is gradual. So much so that we barely notice it amidst the distractions of an all-encompassing welfare state. As a nation, we are in palliative care, comfortable, even euphoric, but dying nonetheless.

In the final stages, palliation will fail. As we cling desperately to the vestiges of a once fine nation, we will experience our collective demise as lingering and painful.

Perhaps by then we will understand that our wounds are self-inflicted.

For we are not dying of natural causes. We are committing suicide.

Another nation may arise and flourish where ours lies prostrate. If so, it will have learned to resist the allurements of the culture of death.

The proximate cause of our dying is a failure to reproduce ourselves. Our birth rate has been below replacement level for three decades, and is declining. It may seem as though we are reproducing ourselves because the population continues to increase. This is the result of an earlier high fertility rate, in virtue of which births still outnumber deaths, thus masking the effects of our more recent declining rate.

It is one of the paradoxes of demographics that a growing population can co-exist with unsustainable birth rates, but only for a time. Inevitably, the population stops increasing and then begins an accelerating decline. In a culture of death, this is difficult, if not impossible, to arrest, let alone reverse.

Through census data, we have already begun to track a decline in the ratio of workers to retirees. Gradually, but inevitably, it will become increasingly onerous to finance the pensions and medical expenses of the elderly. As in the Third World, we depend on our children for financial support when we grow old. The difference is that whereas the Third World aged depend on their own children, we depend on everybody's. Because governments mediate the support, we tend to lose sight of its origins and think that we can dispense with children without serious economic consequences.

This is only one of the economic and social dislocations we can expect as the population ages and then declines. Moreover, it is questionable whether an aging population can maintain an adequate level of entrepreneurial drive and economic creativity. Despite the assurances of our leaders, immigration will not save us. We have no alternative but to save ourselves.

Intermediate causes of our dying include sexual licence, contraception, abortion, the decline of marriage and the family, and consumerism.

When we embraced contraception, we severed the link between the relational and procreative meanings of sex. Closed to life, and to the future, we have focused on the gratifications of the present. As a result, we conceive fewer children than we need to replace ourselves and we abort any who arrive inconveniently.

If we had adopted natural family planning instead of contraception, we could have remained open to life and to the future. But natural methods, which require that we abstain from sex during fertile periods, do not work without self-control and commitment.

Nor does marriage, which contraceptive sex undermines by limiting spousal self-giving, and divorce destroys by repudiating lifetime vows. Since marriage is the foundation of the family and the family is the basic cell of society, marital decay is infectious. As marriage goes, so goes the nation. Our welfare state plays a key role in this. It promotes contraception and supports no-fault divorce. It endorses values-free sex education that challenges the family's prerogatives with respect to sexual expression. It considers non-marital sexual unions, including same-sex couplings, virtually equal to marriage. It bypasses families, replacing, rather than supporting, them, in order to focus on the rights of individuals. It enforces tax and other policies that make full-time parenting financially difficult and socially unacceptable.

The drive to accumulate material goods also plays a key role in our collective dying. Unlike the pioneers who settled this land, we are not content to deny ourselves today so that we can consume tomorrow. We want to consume today. As with sex, so with wealth, we do not wish to defer gratification. Consequently, the material sacrifices required to produce a sustainable population repel us.

The remote causes of our dying are pride, lust, and greed. Appropriately, the wise among us call these deadly sins. The foolish consider such vices to be virtues, self-esteem, self-expression, self-fulfilment.

Joe Campbell writes from Saskatchewan and contributes frequently to Catholic Insight on a wide range of issues but especially on Catholic social teaching.