ROME — Pope Francis once again insisted Wednesday people should not substitute pets for children, praising Indonesia for its higher birthrate.
Some countries adopt “a law of death, that is by limiting births, limiting the greatest richness that a nation can have, its births,” the pontiff stated in a meeting with civil authorities and diplomats in Jakarta’s presidential palace, during a visit to the mostly Muslim nation.
“Your country, meanwhile, has families with three, four, and five children. This is seen in the average age of the nation,” the pope continued, noting the favorable contrast.
“Keep going like this. It is an example for all countries,” he said. “It may seem funny that perhaps some families prefer to have a cat or a small dog, and not a child, but this is not right.”
At this, Indonesian President Joko Widodo burst out laughing and the pope turned to him and remarked: “It’s true, isn’t it?”
Pope Francis is currently engaged in the longest trip of his 11-year papacy, visiting four countries in the Asia Pacific over 12 days, the most continuous time he has spent away from the Vatican since his election in 2013.
After Indonesia, the 87-year-old pontiff plans to visit Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and Singapore.
Francis has often criticized couples who forego having children and get pets instead, tying the trend to dwindling birthrates in the West.
“The other day, I spoke about the demographic winter there is nowadays, in which we see that people do not want to have children, or just one and no more,” the pope told a group gathered in the Vatican in 2022.
“And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one – but they have two dogs, two cats,” he said. “Yes, dogs and cats take the place of children. Yes, it’s funny, I understand, but it is the reality.”
“And this denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity,” he added. “And in this way civilization becomes aged and without humanity, because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood.”
Again last spring, Pope Francis lamented the West’s ongoing demographic decline, insisting that fewer children signals a lack of hope in the future.
Countering “outdated” myths of dangerous overpopulation, the pontiff contended that far from being a problem, human beings are the solution to the world’s difficulties.
Without naming names, the pope seemingly referred to characters like Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who penned the 1968 doomsday bestseller The Population Bomb, which enkindled hysteria over the future of the world and the earth’s ability to sustain human life.
Among Ehrlich’s predictions that proved spectacularly wrong, he prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
At the root of pollution and starvation in the world are not too many children being born, the pope asserted, but rather “the choices of those who think only of themselves, the delirium of an unbridled, blind and rampant materialism, of a consumerism that, like an evil virus, undermines the existence of people and society.”
Houses “fill up with objects and are emptied of children, becoming very sad places,” the pope added. “There is no shortage of dogs and cats. … These are not lacking. There is a shortage of children.”
“The problem of our world is not the children who are born: it is selfishness, consumerism and individualism, which make people satiated, lonely and unhappy,” he said.
According to the pope, the birth rate is “the first indicator of the hope of a people.”
“Without children and young people, a country loses its desire for the future,” he said, noting that the average age of the Italian population has now risen to 47 years.
If we were to take these data as a base, “we would be forced to say that Italy is progressively losing its hope in tomorrow, like the rest of Europe,” he said.
“The Old Continent is increasingly turning into the continent of the old, a tired and resigned continent, so caught up in exorcising loneliness and anguish that it no longer knows how to savor, in the civilization of giving, the true beauty of life,” he said.
On that occasion, the pope’s words sparked a flurry of abuse on social media, with many taking issue at the pope’s suggestion that couples who adopt pets over children are “selfish.”