CNA Staff, Jun 7, 2024 / 08:30 am (CNA).
The Federation of Catholic Family Associations (FAFCE) in Europe on June 5 announced its policy toolkit for the European Parliament to combat the “demographic winter,” invest in pro-family policies that promote work-family balance, and promote digital safety for children.
As this weekend’s elections kick off across European Union (EU) member states from June 6–9, the policy toolkit “invites incoming parliamentarians to prioritize families in their policymaking for this new legislature,” according to the June 5 press release.
The European Union is on the brink of a major population decline according to a 2023 publication by Eurostat, which highlights its decreasing birth rates and population shrinkage since 2020.
The challenge of declining birth rates
“While this election is taking place towards the start of summer, we are freezing into a demographic winter,” FAFCE president Vincenzo Bassi said in a statement. “Birth rates have plummeted and the pandemic of loneliness has spread across the continent.”
One 2023 study by the European Commission highlights “uncertainty of the future” as a reason for the decreasing birth rates. But while the birth rate lags, the desire for kids does not, according to a 2014 Pew survey.
“We need our European institutions to dedicate resources and human capital to understanding its root causes as well as investing in a demographic spring for the continent,” he continued.
“Without intergenerational solidarity, we can’t begin to meet the many challenges in front of us,” he noted. “This requires families and children to be prioritized, without whom there is no future.”
A call for supporting families
FAFCE called the family “the antidote to the culture of waste and unrestrained consumption” in the release, which calls for families to “be at the center of the ecological transition.”
“The problem is not the children but consumerism,” Bassi explained. “There is no ecology without the person; no person without the family. Therefore, there is no ecology without the families and communities of families at the heart of the transition.”
Bassi also highlighted a need for work-family balance to promote family life, including Sunday as “a common day of rest,” as part of a “right to disconnect.”
“It is possible to have a Europe where we workers are productive and also are able to enjoy valuable family time,” Bassi said. “Mothers and fathers need a balance of work and family life, for the sake of their children, themselves, and wider society.”
Bassi also emphasized encouraging pregnant mothers in their careers and giving them “the possibility to put their creativity and entrepreneurship to practice as well as motherhood.”
Protecting children from pornography
Another issue that Europe and the rest of the world faces is digital safety for children. As one 2023 study by the National Institute of Health describes, “Children are often exposed to psychological damage, abuse, and violence owing to a lack of internet monitoring.”
FAFCE encouraged the development of policies to protect children in the digital world, expressing to candidates the need for a European Parliament campaign to show the risks of exposure of children to pornography.
“Pornography exposure has been correlated with nonrelational or recreational sexual attitudes and behaviors in previous studies,” the 2023 study noted.
“It is crucial that online platforms are able to detect materials containing abuse of children as well as being able to report and remove them,” Bassi said in a May 23 press release on the European Child Shield Platform, a network of legal and medical experts that advocates for digital protections for children.
“We reiterate also that institutions have a duty to ensure that children are not consumers of harmful material online,” he continued. “Children’s exposure to po***graphy is already a form of online sexual abuse that our societies are tolerating.”
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In our increasingly anti-family and anti-natalist culture, this is an uphill climb.
Revealing is the mentality of secularism when addressing levels of priority, place ecological concern in terms of consumption and waste as the goal for greater child bearing to wit larger families. It’s symptomatic of a culture that has lost interest in others, of bringing new life into the world at the price of curtailing personal comforts and priorities.
Childlessness is worldwide. S Korea, one of the world’s most advanced, wealthy per capita nations, is fast on the road to disintegration at least in terms of population as AI systems take over the workforce. Forecast, if the trend continues sans modification is a world of highly technical nations with minuscule populations. Insofar as a diminishing priesthood it would seem a small population would compensate, although that prospect will be countered by an expected much smaller body of believers.
The Catholic Family Federation has cause for alarm as the disintegration of the traditional family centered on love of others love of life spells the disintegration of Europe [and the world] as we know it.
We read: “There is no ecology without the person; no person without the family. Therefore, there is no ecology without the families and communities of families at the heart of the transition.”
About “ecology,” the Christian cosmology distinguishes between the “natural ecology” and the interrelated but very distinct “HUMAN ECOLOGY.” A distinction still found in Pope St. John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1993), before the useful-but-conflated “integral ecology” of Laudato Si (2015). This conflation might be exploited as fertile ground for AI and really big benefit-cost-ratios! It is also likely a distortion of the much earlier “integral humanism” which referred not to an integral ecology or one-world-ism, but to the “whole person and all persons.”
So, Yes, the looming demographic winter…This AND concerns short- and long-term “solidarity” which is complexly related to various tipping points and feedback loops in parts and all of the natural ecology—our global amniotic sac. The whole Catholic Social Teaching has a lot of work to do to more fully engage all of its basic PRINCIPLES:
…The focus on Families (FAFCE) and first the transcendent dignity of the Human Person, and then also Solidarity and Subsidiarity both always together, and the Common Good as understood in non-Benthamite terms (!). Other principles include the preferential option for the Poor (economic, but also cultural and spiritual) together with the dignity of Labor, the right and obligation to Participate in coherent politics, other Rights and Responsibilities both together, and informed Conscience and faithful Citizenship. (This litany corresponds closely to the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, 2004).
All of this OVERLAID now by the many different voices of incomplete science. And with the Christian cosmology—which underlies European institutions—possibly UNDERCUT by comparative Muslim demographics and the fatalistic Islamic cosmology. It’s almost as if Catholic academia has an overdue homework assignment! One largely neglected ever since the ivory tower opted for the 1967 Land o’ Lakes Declaration of adolescent autonomy from all “outside” influences.
It’s refreshing and heartening, surely, to hear about the solid and well-timed efforts like the Federation of Catholic Family Associations (FAFCE).