POPE: LOW NUMBER OF BIRTHS “IS A FIGURE THAT REVEALS A GREAT CONCERN FOR TOMORROW”

Pope Francis shared the stage on May 12 with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Fri 12 May 2023:

A society’s birth rate is a key indicator of the hope people have in the future. Starting a family in Italy is becoming a “titanic effort” that only the rich can afford, Pope Francis said on Friday, warning that “savage” free-market conditions were preventing the young from having children.

The pope shared the stage on May 12 with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during a two-day conference on “The General State of the Birth Rate,” held at Conciliazione Auditorium close to the Vatican.

“The birth of children, in fact, is the main indicator for measuring the hope of a people,” Pope Francis said. “If few are born it means there is little hope. And this not only has repercussions from an economic and social point of view but also undermines confidence in the future.”

The low number of births, Pope Francis said, “is a figure that reveals a great concern for tomorrow.”

He lamented that childbearing and rearing is seen as the burden of families only, and the pressure this puts on young adults today, “who grow up in uncertainty, if not disillusionment and fear.”

Young people “experience a social climate in which starting a family has turned into a titanic effort, instead of being a shared value that everyone recognizes and supports,” he said.

The decline in communal living, together with an increasing self-reliance creates loneliness, Pope Francis said, and one consequence is that only the wealthy have the freedom to live the life they want.

“This is unfair, as well as demeaning,” he added.

The pope also criticized a culture that places pets before human children.

He said at a recent audience, he went to greet a woman of around 50 years old — “like me,” he joked — but was surprised to be asked to bless her dog, which she called, “my baby.”

“I had no patience and scolded the lady,” he said, pointing out the great number of hungry children in the world.

In what appeared to be a reference not only to welcoming the birth of children but also to welcoming migrants, Pope Francis said “a happy community naturally develops desires to generate and integrate, to welcome, while an unhappy society is reduced to a sum of individuals trying to defend what they have at all costs.”

He emphasized again that “the birth rate challenge is a matter of hope,” though, he underlined, hope is not the same as optimism or “a vague positive feeling about the future.”

“The General State of the Birth Rate” is a conference for Italian political, business, and organization leaders to reflect on Italy’s demographic crisis, caused by one of the lowest birth rates in Europe: 1.25 births per woman.

Italy hit a historic low number of births in 2022, with only about 393,000 children born in the country.

The same year, the country saw 700,000 deaths, marking a dangerous decline in population.

Births in Italy dropped below 400,000 in 2022 for the first time, registering a 14th consecutive annual fall, with the overall population declining by 179,000 to 58.85 million.

A shrinking population is a major worry for the euro zone’s third-largest country, with the economy minister warning this week that Italy’s GDP risked dropping by 18 percentage points over the next two decades if current birth trends continued.

The education minister said on Thursday current demographics suggested that Italy’s school population was set to shrink by one million over the next 10 years.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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