Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Landing
Editorial
The Anchor
July 14, 2006
As Pope Benedict was flying from Rome to Valencia for last weekend’s World Meeting of Families, reporters on the papal plane asked him for a preview of what he would say. They were particularly interested in how he would respond to the sexual and familial revolution — same-sex marriage legislation, fast-track divorces, embryonic stem-cell research, easing of abortion laws and the elimination of religious education in state schools — that Spain’s Zapatero government has been aggressively implementing in its first two years.
Benedict’s response caught several of the reporters off-guard. “I would say that we shouldn’t begin immediately with the negative things,” Benedict XVI said to the press corps, “because we also see families that love each other, that are happy, and we want to encourage this reality, which gives us hope for the future. It’s true that there are problems, things to which Christian life must say ‘no.’ We want to make people understand that on the basis of human nature, it’s man and woman who are ordained to one another, who are ordained to give humanity a future.”
In his homilies and addresses during the weekend, Benedict continued to stress this positive aspect of the vocation of the marriage of man and woman to fill us with hope and give humanity a future. He recalled with gratitude and joy the truth that man and woman are created in the image and likeness of God, who is a loving communion of persons and has called man and woman to an intimate and fruitful communion of life and love in marriage. Through their one flesh union, man and woman are enabled to act in God’s image and likeness and become collaborators with him in the summit of his creative work, the bringing-into-existence of new human persons in his image and in theirs.
Proclaiming this Gospel of the family in God’s plan has been one of the top priorities of the pontificates of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. From Pope John Paul’s famous catechetical addresses on the theology of the body to Pope Benedict’s first encyclical on the purification of human love by divine love, the successor of St. Peter has been announcing the deep and abiding blessings of self-giving love, marriage, human sexuality and children.
This uplifting message of marriage and the family as a source and sign of hope and a service to the future of humanity is one that increasingly and urgently needs to be proclaimed from the housetops and lived joyfully in Christian homes and bedrooms. Christian couples, Benedict said, are called to live an emphatic and inspiring “yes” to the goodness of marriage and children, which will provide a light shining to all those walking in the valley of the culture of death.
This “yes” has been largely muted in the Church in western society for the past few decades. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the fertility rates in traditionally Catholic European countries, from which most of the participants in Valencia came. For a population to sustain itself, the average number of children per couple needs to be 2.1. In Spain, the fertility rate is 1.1; in Italy, 1.2, in Germany 1.3; in France, despite the large families of immigrant Muslims, 1.7. By 2050, Germany is expected to lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany and sixty percent of the Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles. Altogether eighteen European countries are reporting more deaths than births. Europe is dying. More appropriately, Europeans are slowly committing demographic suicide.
Closer to home, things are not much better. While the fertility rate of the United States overall is 2.09, four of the five states with the lowest number of children per couple are in New England. In Massachusetts, the rate is 1.66.
If children are a sign and source of hope, then the failure to replace oneself is a sign of a certain despair. It also brings all types of extra burdens on society. To look at the situation from an economic point of view alone, as fewer young people enter the work force, there will be decreased productivity; as more people retire, not only will there be higher social security costs on the working generation, but it will also make it increasingly harder for young families to afford children on their own. There will be a vicious cycle of economic stagnation and a continued downward spiral in fertility.
What are the causes of the plummeting birth rates? Experts, like Eric Cohen of the Ethics and Public Policy center, point to three. First, children have become culturally optional; there is no longer a stigma attached to a childless woman. Secondly, they are now deemed economically burdensome; while they were once economic assets on a farm, now they are voracious consumers who produce nothing until generally after they leave the home. Thirdly, they are technologically avoidable through the use of contraception, without even the cost in former days of disciplining the sex drive.
Even among those who want and have a child, Cohen says, “the most compelling reason not to have more children is to benefit the child they already have, with the best schools, the best medical care, and the nicest neighborhoods. In this conception, having only one or maybe two children translates into an effort on the part of parents to act responsibly in a world of high economic expectations and emotional pressure.” Pro-child in intention, there are anti-children in effect.
It is against this backdrop of the birth dearth and its causes that Pope Benedict addressed Catholic families from across the globe in Valencia. More than any other priority, he wanted to encourage them, solid Catholic families who had sacrificed much to attend the World Meeting, to be generous in cooperating with God for the increase of their family, the human family and God’s family. The first commandment God ever gave was “increase and multiply,” (Gen 1:22), and in most generations this has been a precept obeyed with joy and a source of great blessings. Like all God’s commandments, it is meant to teach us both how to love God and to love others. It is meant to help man and woman grow more deeply into the image and likeness of God. It is a positive message meant to give humanity a future.