OPINION:
At a Mass concluding the recent Jubilee Youth Celebration in Rome, Pope Leo XIV urged the more than 1 million young people in attendance to “spread enthusiasm and witness your faith.”
I wish he had told them to witness their faith by marrying young and having lots of children.
Once, Catholicism was synonymous with large families. In the town where I grew up in the 1950s, Catholic families with only one or two children were suspected of being in league with Planned Parenthood.
Today, Catholic countries in Europe and Latin America are leading the death march into the depths of demographic winter.
To maintain population stability, the average woman must have 2.1 children in her lifetime. In Poland, the fertility rate is 1.3. In Spain and Chile, it’s 1.2.
All are overwhelmingly Catholic.
What happened?
A lessening of the church’s authority after Vatican II and substituting trendy causes (anti-war, environmentalism) for Catholic doctrine played a part. For many, calling themselves Catholic was more nostalgia than devotion.
Pope Leo’s predecessor understood the importance of having children. In 2022, Pope Francis described falling fertility as a “social emergency” that, “while not immediately perceptible like other problems which occupy the news,” is nevertheless “very urgent” because it is “impoverishing everyone’s future.”
Francis called voluntary childlessness “a form of selfishness.”
“People don’t want to have children. Maybe they’ll have one child and not more than that. And many couples don’t have any children because they don’t want any. … But they have two dogs and two cats,” he observed.
These families are helping create an increasingly bleak future — a world with fewer and fewer young workers to carry society’s burden and more and more elderly who are part of that burden. It will be a world where factories stand idle and farms are untended, where schools are turned into senior centers.
To paraphrase British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey on the eve of World War I, the lamps will soon be going out all over the world.
I understand the importance of proselytizing to Christianity, but unless you want to be a missionary in some disease-ridden jungle or jihad-infested country, how hard is it compared with having children?
Children require real sacrifice. Parenthood is a full-time job that includes getting up for 3 a.m. feedings and changing messy diapers for the sixth time in a day. How about coming home to a gang of howling savages impervious to reason and determined to inflict maximum damage on their siblings?
Then they become teenagers and the real fun begins.
Still, parenthood is the most arduous and the most satisfying journey you can take. If you’re lucky, someday, when they have matured, you can look at your progeny and say: I added to the store of goodness in the world by helping create and shape these human beings.
For the religious, parenthood is not optional. The First Commandment is not “Be fruitful and multiply — if it fits your lifestyle.”
That’s why it’s people of faith who are having large families, including Mormons, Hasidic Jews, evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics.
Pope Leo has good material to work with. The young adults who traveled to Rome for the Jubilee Youth Celebration came from 150 countries. Their joy was contagious. They would make great parents.
An Aug. 3 story on National Public Radio, “Chile’s plunging birth rate may foreshadow future in the U.S.,” cast the crisis in another nominally Catholic country in stark terms. A reporter interviewed young women on the streets of Santiago who said motherhood would be too restrictive for them.
Antonia Orellana, minister of women and gender equality in Chile’s leftist government, said her nation’s flight from motherhood and into oblivion should be celebrated. “We have now more women studying in higher education, technical schools and universities than ever.”
In the past decade, the number of births in Chile fell by 29%. Feminism has triumphed over human survival.
Other nations are frantically searching for solutions to the birth dearth, which usually involve subsidies. Still, declining fertility is a matter of the heart, not the wallet.
Religious leaders of all persuasions should be mobilizing the faithful to combat the great plague of the 21st century: rapidly falling fertility leading to the end of civilization.
Pope Francis criticized the couples who choose pets over children. He knew the pews can’t be filled with cats and dogs.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
