Rome Newsroom, May 2, 2024 / 09:00 am (CNA).
The Vatican announced on Thursday that Pope Francis will speak at an event on Italy’s demographic crisis as the country’s birth rate sits at a historic low.
Pope Francis will address “The General State of the Birth Rate” conference on May 10 at the Conciliazione Auditorium close to the Vatican.
The two-day event organized by the Forum of Family Associations and the Foundation for Births seeks to address the 50 years of steady decline in births across Europe, and especially in Italy, and what can be done to reverse it.
Births in Italy dropped to a historic low in 2023. Italy’s national statistics bureau recorded 379,000 births last year, a 3.6% decline from 2022 and a 34.2% drop from 2008.
Italy’s overall population has been falling since 2014 with 282,000 more deaths than births in Italy in 2023. The country has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe: 1.2 births per woman.
Pope Francis has described the low number of births as “a figure that reveals a great concern for tomorrow.” He lamented last year the “social climate in which starting a family has turned into a titanic effort, instead of being a shared value that everyone recognizes and supports.”
“The General State of the Birth Rate” will feature Italian government ministers, business leaders, and media personalities who will give talks on the family, including Eugenia Roccella, Italy’s family minister.
It will be the third time that Pope Francis has participated in the conference, which is supported by the Italian Ministry for Family, Birth, and Equal Opportunity.
Last year, Pope Francis shared the stage with Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
“The birth of children, in fact, is the main indicator for measuring the hope of a people,” Pope Francis said at the conference in 2023.
“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 U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported last week that the U.S. birth rate also hit a record low in 2023 and that the total number of births was the lowest it’s been in decades.
According to the report, slightly fewer than 3.6 million babies were born in 2023, or 54.4 births per 1,000 women aged 15 through 44. This was a 2% decline in total births and a 3% decline in births per 1,000 women when compared with the previous year.
“The birth rate challenge is a matter of hope,” Pope Francis said.
Hope, the pope said, “is not an illusion or an emotion that you feel, no; it is a concrete virtue, a life attitude. And it has to do with concrete choices. Hope is nourished by each person’s commitment to the good, it grows when we feel we are participating and involved in making meaning of our own and others’ lives.”
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When you double message a positive v a negative the logical conclusion is that you’re advocating the negative. Otherwise you wouldn’t introduce the negative in equal terms unless your intention is to promote the negative.
Such is the case with contraception, abortion, or, for example, childbearing a positive contrasted with “birthing like rabbits”. And such is the case with the Dicasteries related to the family, the decomposition of those established by John Paul II, and the recruitment of abortion advocates to refill the ranks.
Already skeptical by nature following to unproductive entirely destructive consequences of the two great wars, Italians are now cynical a growing majority living the motto of the crew of the sinking ship, Every man for himself. Armani suits, a shiny Alfa Romeo, and a good dinner at a local restaurant is adequate paradise for the more middle upper class fortunate. The poor perhaps still holding to the faith. If you read the news media over at L’Espresso you’ll get the picture. Giorgia Meloni may be a hopeful change, although she and her party Brothers of Italy are up against the tide of liberal cynics.
If people don’t want to have children that is entirely their right to do so. You have no right to force people to have children they do not want or cannot afford.
Seeing people hem and haw over the sex lives of people in marriages they are not part of themselves is deeply disturbing.
If you want the birthrate to go up, then why don’t you personally start popping out as many children as time and your body will allow?
Life is sacred and a precious gift. Children offer opportunities to parents, grandparents, siblings, relations, and teachers to feel useful and important to pass on their time-tested wisdom to the little innocents.