In a speech delivered to the Forum for Family Associations, Pope Francis told Italy today to fund families in order to grow their population.
He told the forum that recovery for Italy could only progress by, ‘starting with life and with the human being’.
Francis pointed out that Globalist leaders make it intentionally difficult for young people to get married and to have families, stating: ‘most young people want to have children, but their dreams of life…clash with a demographic winter, still cold and dark: only half of young people believe they will be able to have two children in their lifetime’.
In 2018, the highest numbers of abortions were carried out between women aged 30-34, totalling 10%. 4% were reported amongst those aged 15-19 years.
This and other factors have caused Francis to also state that, ‘Italy reached the lowest number of births since national unity, not because of Covid-19, but because of a continuous, progressive downward trend, an increasingly harsh winter’.
He continued: ‘a society that does not welcome life stops living. Children are the hope that makes a people reborn!. If families are not at the center of the present, there will be no future; but if families restart, everything restarts’.
‘We will not be able to feed production and protect the environment if we do not pay attention to families and children. Sustainable growth comes from here’.
‘It cannot be a factory of notions to be poured over individuals; it must be the privileged time for encounter and human growth. At school, one does not mature only through grades, but through the faces one meets’.
He then offered encouragement for those involved in pro natal activism, stating: ‘Sometimes you will feel as if you are shouting in the desert, fighting against windmills. But go ahead, do not give up, because it is beautiful to dream the good and build the future. And without births, there is no future’.
Francis has drawn some criticism for seeming to be pro migration, yet he has consistently been for treating migrants respectfully rather than insisting that they arrive. In Fratelli Tutti he stated, Sadly, some “are attracted by Western culture, sometimes with unrealistic expectations that expose them to grave disappointments. Unscrupulous traffickers, frequently linked to drug cartels or arms cartels, exploit the weakness of migrants, who too often experience violence, trafficking, psychological and physical abuse and untold sufferings on their journey”. Those who emigrate “experience separation from their place of origin, and often a cultural and religious uprooting as well. Fragmentation is also felt by the communities they leave behind, which lose their most vigorous and enterprising elements, and by families, especially when one or both of the parents migrates, leaving the children in the country of origin”. For this reason, “there is also a need to reaffirm the right not to emigrate, that is, to remain in one’s homeland”.
This jars with the naïve commentators who believe that to be prolife or to be Catholic means one must pretend that there is no such thing as human traffickers or corporate exploitation, that there are no peoples trying to import migrants in order to avail of having to pay lower wages or to receive higher payments from rents from lack of supply of housing.
This was evident in an article by America Magazine on the pope’s speech, which suggests that the United States needs to be more pro immigration in order to grow the population but also needed to fund families more. It does state, ‘We are supposed to welcome people fleeing violence and poverty out of Christian compassion, not out of a calculation that we need more bodies to keep our economy going and to care for us as we get older. But it is true that the United States has always depended on immigration for growth and energy’, yet it then argues that the government’s arm can be twisted to do the right thing because they are benefitting economically from both. The can’t have their cake and eat it, when things are so dysfunctional already. The United States of America is a very different society from that of Europe, for example 1% of the US population lives outside the States, while almost 20% of the Irish population lives outside it. Similarly, only 14% of the US Population are immigrants, while 20% of Ireland’s are now. This has been accompanied by a 24% freefall in birth rates in Ireland in the 5 years. Europe’s anti family policies are at a level that needs to be reckoned with in a fashion other than just importing readymade economic units to make up the shortfall. What the open borders Catholics won’t admit, is that the second generation of those immigrants will just end up in the same predicament as those who were in the country to begin with.
The simplest solution to all of this is for countries to follow the example of the Visegard Group, who this week launched a pro family coalition to reward and support those who have families and children. They said that, ‘Society without families would be like civilisation without culture or mathematics without numbers’. A pro family approach to politics, religion and nationhood is the answer all of Europe’s current ills.
