Posted on 12/07/2018 9:23:55 AM PST by ebb tide
On the very same day on which the Pontifical Urban University was opening an exhibit (see photo) dedicated to the heroic Ulma family of Poland - “this big family,” Pope Francis said, “shot by Nazi Germans during the second world war for having hidden and given aid to Jews” - in Italy the National Institute of Statistics released the figures on births and marriages in the year 2017.
Anything but “big” families, like that of those Polish martyrs or like many in Italy a century ago. The collapse of the birth rate here reached an all-time low in 2017. In a country of 60.5 million inhabitants, just 458,151 children were born last year, and even fewer, around 440,000, new births are predicted for 2018, a little more than 7 for every 1,000 inhabitants, 30 percent below the average for the European Union, which is already the region with the lowest birth rate in the world.
If one considers that the “total fertility rate” that ensures zero growth, meaning a balanced turnover of the population, is 2.1 children per woman, the Italian figure has been dramatically below this for decades and in 2017 sank to the level of 1.32, with quite a few regions even more stingy with births, and with Sardinia even falling to the level of 1.06.
These are numbers that already attest to an inexorable march toward the extinction of a people.
But even more striking are the figures concerning marriage. There were 203,000 in 2016, and dropped to 191,000 in 2017, down 6 percent in a single year, a decrease second only to the structural one in 1975, the year following the approval of divorce in Italy.
But take care. What have fallen are not marriages with at least one foreign spouse, nor remarriages of the divorced and widowed. The real collapse is in first marriages - down 7.3 percent - and even more in religious marriages, which fell by 10.5 percent between 2016 and 2017.
This is how the demographer Roberto Volpi, a non-Catholic, comments on the latest figures, in the newspaper “Il Foglio” of November 29:
“The reason why this setback in religious marriage is even more worrying than all the rest is easily said. Still today 70 percent of births in Italy take place within marriage, but it is marriage with a religious ceremony that clearly assures more births compared to marriage with a civil ceremony. This latter is in fact above all the marriage to which the divorced, widowed, and mixed couples of Italians and foreigners resort, unlike religious marriage which remains by far the preference of the unmarried, of a younger age and a greater inclination to have children.”
And he concludes:
“A high marriage rate in Italy marked the years of the postwar reconstruction, of the economic miracle, of entrepreneurship and hope for the future among Italians. It is marriages that tell us how healthy or sick we are. Currently we are at a roughly terminal stage. It would not be bad if the Church, the first to pay the price, would understand this and get moving.”
This last quip sounds paradoxical, after a double synod that the Catholic Church dedicated precisely to the topic of the family.
Paradoxical but true, seeing how that double synod was intentionally scuppered in the dispute over communion for the divorced and remarried and on the merciful admission of what marriage is not, from cohabitation to homosexual couples.
A dispute that left the field open for the offensive of the adversaries of true marriage. As in the famous saying of Titus Livius: “Dum Romae consulitur, Saguntum expugnatur.” While in Rome they discussed pointlessly, into the city stole the enemy.
(English translation by Matthew Sherry, Ballwin, Missouri, U.S.A.)
"Some people think that - excuse my expression here - that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits."
"No. Parenthood is about being responsible. This is clear." Pope Francis
Ping
“Some people think that - excuse my expression here - that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits.”
“No. Parenthood is about being responsible. This is clear.”
Cecile Richards?
Article would be more meaningful if it showed the marriage rate as a percent of the population.
If the population is shrinking because of the birthrate is too low, then yeah marriages are going to decrease too.
I’ve never understood why so many people don’t want kids...
I can understand how some folks might not want (or feel they can handle) LARGE families....(and that’s an interesting discussion........)
but so many people nowadays say they don’t want ANY families...
and this far transcends the RCC...
it baffles me...
“It is marriages that tell us how healthy or sick we are. Currently we are at a roughly terminal stage.”
Selfish. Men don’t want to give everything they own to a narcissistic harpie. There’s no guarantee they’ll be able to raise the kids they have either.
Not a mystery.
HUMMMMMMM......
well, if many modern RCC girls are “narcissistic harpies”
and if many modern Jewish girls are JAPs (Jewish American Princesses),
then
what are many modern Protestant girls? (or dare we ask?)
I see that all the time...alas...
good point..
It’s sad, but its learned behavior, and guys are learning.
indeed..and many young men today have had almost no genuine fathering themselves, so they lack the example
The yearning for a meaningful life has been displaced by the pursuit of pleasure, property, and power.
well, there are pleasures on earth to be sure
but
pleasure, property, and power have very little lasting value
I guess a lot of young folks missed that sermon, alas...
Correct, and the abandoned daughters have daddy issues. A vicious cycle.
Thanks feminism!
corrupt and tyrannical politicians
and
the breakdown of family life
sounds a bit like the Fall of Rome
There is a book out there called something like “The Rise and Fall of All Great Powers” that highlights the common themes in the fall of the great world powers. I want to say it was written in the 90’s.
Fascinating book. The first 200 pages of Jacques Barzun’s “500 Years of Western Civilization” is can’t miss. An eighth grader could understand Barzun, but his observations are seismic.
bump
thanks yes. several authors have done this theme including Paul Kennedy and ...
PDJT is trying to fix some things but the Clintoons and especially Obammy did SO DAMNED MUCH DAMAGE
that USA could be past the Point of No Return
the damage is not “just” political, it is spiritual and cultural, with our core, basic moral values shot almost all to Hell
we will see. I have hope but....the solution is not so much in the political arena as the cultural and spiritual
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