Posted on 06/10/2014 10:24:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
Pope Francis said something so important last week that it will either be widely ignored or widely disparaged.
The pope criticized "these marriages, in which the spouses do not want children, in which the spouses want to remain without fertility. This culture of well-being ... convinced us: It's better not to have children! It's better! You can go explore the world, go on holiday, you can have a villa in the countryside; you can be carefree. It might be better -- more comfortable -- to have a dog, two cats, and the love goes to the two cats and the dog."
He is right. More than ever before, young men and women in most affluent Western countries (and Russia) have decided not to have children. Instead, many shower love and attention on dogs and cats. Ask many young women -- married or single -- if they have any children, and if they do not, you are likely to be told, "I have two cats" or "I have two dogs." There are authors whose book jacket photo shows them with their dog or cat.
In much of the West, animals are the new children.
The pope made this declaration for two reasons: one demographic and one religious and moral.
The demographic reason is that the populations of European countries such as the one in which he lives -- Italy -- are gradually disappearing.
--Italy's birth rate is approximately 1.41 children per woman, making Italy 203 out of 224 countries in terms of its fertility rate.
--LifeSiteNews, a religious-oriented news website, reported that Italian demographer Giancarlo Baliga said last year that by 2041, "The age group most represented in the structure of the Italians will become the 70s."
--According to Fred Pearce in the Guardian, "Italy has the world's second oldest population."
--According to population statistics website GeoHive, Italy will have two and a half million fewer people at the end of this century than it had in the beginning. And the only reason it will not far fewer is that so many Italian citizens will be foreign-born immigrants.
--According to Professor Peter McDonald, president of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (2010-2013) and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, if Italy remains at its current fertility levels and does not compensate with foreign immigrants, it will lose 86 percent of its population by the end of the century, falling to 8 million compared with today's 56 million.
The pope knows that Italians and other nations are slowly disappearing.
The question is: Why? Why do so many people prefer to parent pets than children?
Throughout history, there were three primary reasons people had many children: Lack of contraception, economic necessity and religion.
All three reasons are gone.
Thanks to modern contraception, couples can have all the sex they want without conceiving.
Regarding economic need, most people in welfare states no longer need children to care for them in old age because the state will do that.
And with the demise of religion in the developed world, there are no values-based reasons to have children.
What this means is that because of contraception and the welfare state, the one compelling reason to have children is that one's values demand it.
Those values overwhelmingly come from religion. The dominant religions of the Western world, Judaism and Christianity, demand marriage and children. Consequently, the people in affluent Western countries most likely to have more than two, and certainly more than three, children are Orthodox Jews, Evangelical Protestants, religious Catholics and active Mormons.
But secularism is now dominant in the West, which ends the values-based reason to have children.
One might argue that there is a fourth reason to have children -- a desire to raise and love children and have a family. But one shouldn't put too much stock in that argument. Without religion, even those who want children almost never have more than two. And more and more secular individuals find that their desire to nurture is fulfilled by loving cats and dogs.
That was the pope's point.
My parents moved 900 miles away to get away from all of us.
This turned out to be a not very good idea, as after my mother died and my father's Parkinson's with dementia got worse, it eventually became necessary for him to move into my house for the last months of his life.
The last few years that he lived on his own were pretty nasty for him. I was grateful that he had a little time with us where he was properly-fed, bathed, groomed, was able to make all his doctors' appointments and get proper medical care, got a little bit of exercise, lose some weight, become generally ambulatory again, wasn't getting cheated by folks who cheat old people, and got tucked into bed by his family every night.
Things would have been better if my parents hadn't had this big hang-up about becoming dependent on their children. Taking care of one's parents when they get old and need the help is part of the Commandment.
sitetest
My father is in a comfortable Alheimers Care home, and my mother, who lives in an “Independent Living” building just up the road, sees him almost every day. It’s a lot of work for her, but more manageable than having him in the apartment with her 24/7.
Staffing in care facilities is a big problem, and only going to get worse. My #3 daughter likes being with old people, and I’ve suggested she get Certified Nursing Assistant training as soon as she’s 16, for guaranteed work at better than average pay. Why be camp staff for sub-minimum wage, when you can work at the rehab center two miles away?
I imagine that my older children, in their successful later years, will contribute monetarily, while Mr. Clingy lets me hang around his house doing needlepoint until liver failure gets me.
I have no problem with an obligation to remind the rich (and in America that covers a lot of territory) of their moral obligation to help the poor (tho in America that doesn’t actually cover much territory at all).But if you "remind” the “poor” (especially if broadly defined) of the obligation of the rich to help them, you are in class warfare, “community organizer" territory. And “community organizer” seems to be a pretty lucrative trade - but a trade in envy, which is not commended by the bible.
The state won't be able to do it either. Depending on the state instead of your own children means depending on other people's children. If they're not having children either, that leaves nobody for the state to tax.
What you've said is very interesting, and I'd like to explore it a little more.
In manner that somewhat perplexes me, the Holy Scripture --- both OT and NT --- relies a lot of the rhetoric of "the rich" vs "the poor". (If you are not convinced that this is quite true, please go to BibleGateway or similar and do a keyword search. Roughly 200 references, each, to "rich" and "poor," depending of course on the translation, and almost half of them remind everyone who can read it that the rich have an obligation to come to poor peoples' assistance.)
Tis failure to come to poor people's assistance is even grouped with unnatural lust, as in the case of Sodom: (Ezekiel 16:49) "This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy."
It makes me uncomfortable: I feel (I confess) as if it's something that needs to be finessed, or even explained away.
Jesus goes even further, and says --- for instance, in the parable about the rich man and Lazarus, and in the account of the Last Judgment, Matthew 25 ---that if the rich neglect the needs of the poor, they will be damned to hell.
Note that in these passages, he's not condemning the more prosperous for any crime or fraud or aggression against the poor: just omission, indifference, "mere" neglect.
Mary's understanding of this "rich vs poor" thing makes most uncomfortable reading for me (Luke 1:52-53). It most resembles that class-conscious, community organizers' attitude you alluded to.
The more I dig into it, the more I find it disturbing.
This is not, of course, endorsing envy and resentment on the part of the poor, much less state socialism and so forth, which history has shown makes things much worse. But the uncomfortable implications of "rich" and "poor" are all there in the Bible to see --- and to be proclaimed to all nations!
Do you disregard these instances where the calling to celibacy is endorsed by Our Lord and by St. Paul?
Eunuchs were never permitted in the Ekklesia ! Have you ever read Deuteronomy 23 specially verse one.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
But according to Jesus, they’re permitted in the Kingdom of God!
‘Never called him a Marxist as that would entail atheism. I claimed he’s a socialist, and a wealth redistributionist whereby his upholding of the Commandments I mentioned is highly questionable.
I stand by what I wrote.
Thanks.
I live in L.A.
The archbishop for our diocese is Jose Gomez.
But it takes Eisgesis to read it that way.
That is one way to read it.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
"For there are eunuchs who were born that way from their mother's
If the WORD of YHvH condemned it in
womb; and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men;
and there are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for
the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to
accept this, let him accept it."
Deuteronomy does it not remain true ?
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