ROME — Pope Francis decried falling birthrates in the Western world Thursday, calling the demographic drop a new form of “generative poverty.”
Falling birthrates represent “a real social emergency,” the pontiff told participants in a conference on demographics. “It is not immediately perceptible, like other issues that occupy the news, but it is very urgent: fewer and fewer children are being born, and this means impoverishing everyone’s future; Italy, Europe, and the West are impoverishing their future.”
Many young people “lower the bar of their desire,” Francis said, and instead of having children “content themselves with mediocre substitutes, such as business, a car, travel, jealously guarding their free time.”
“The beauty of a family with many children risks becoming a utopia, a dream that it is difficult to realize,” he said.
The pope described opting out of parenthood as “a new poverty that alarms me.”
“It is the generative poverty of those who discount the desire for happiness in their hearts, of those who resign themselves to watering down their greatest aspirations, of those who are content with little and stop hoping on a bigger scale,” he said.
Pope Francis is surrounded by youth on stage during a conference on Italian demographics in Rome on May 14, 2021. (ANDREW MEDICHINI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
This is “a tragic poverty,” he continued, “because it affects human beings in their greatest wealth: bringing lives into the world to care for them, passing on to others with love the existence they have received.”
Leaders of nations need to wake up to the problem of fewer and fewer children, the pope suggested, and do something about it.
“Failing to see the problem of the declining birthrate is a short-sighted attitude; it means ceasing to look ahead, further forward,” he said. “It means turning the other way, thinking that the problems are always too complex and that nothing can be done. It means, in other words, giving up.”
Things can change “if, without fear, going beyond partisan interests and ideological barriers, we commit together,” he proposed. “Therefore, I hope that at all levels – institutional, media, cultural, economic and social – we will foster, improve and implement concrete policies aimed at revitalizing birth and family.”
“The data, the forecasts and the numbers are by now known to all: action is needed,” the pope declared. “It is the moment to give real answers to families and young people: hope cannot and must not die waiting.”
“I ask God to bless your efforts,” he concluded. “I am close to you and am rooting for you, so that together we can reverse the course of this cold demographic winter.”
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