Dear Colleague:
Seventeen European nations are now having so few wee bairns that there is
little prospect of a demographic comeback. Cardinal Trujillo is among
those who recognize that Europe's days could be numbered.
Steven W. Mosher
President
PRI Weekly Briefing
3 March 2006
Vol. 8 / No. 9
Facing the Facts of Europe's Suicide
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
Will the Muslims inherit Western Europe? "If [Western people] don't do
something, probably," replies Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Senior Fellow in
Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
"That's a very probable outcome. The West doesn't believe in itself."
After decades of overpopulation hysteria, the realization has firmly
dawned on almost everyone paying attention that global birthrates have
fallen fast and far, and that Western European nations' are suicidally
lower than replacement level-though their increasingly radical Muslim
immigrants' fertility is high. It hasn't dawned on quite everyone, or
perhaps British diplomats don't pay attention to such matters, since the
UK's ambassador to the Holy See dismissed demographic concerns at a recent
conference on the family and Centesimus Annus sponsored in Rome by the
Acton Institute. Possibly heralding a new emphasis on the issue, Alfonso
Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council on the Family
and keynote speaker at the conference, admonished Amb. Francis Campbell
about collapsed European birthrates when the latter said that birthrates
are cyclical, and that therefore there is nothing to worry about.
Cardinal Trujillo has spoken about Europe's fertility decline before, but
it is rare for a Vatican cardinal to intervene so firmly at a public event
like Acton's "The Family in the New Economy: Reflections on the Margins on
Centesimus Annus," held January 21 at the North American College.
Trujillo is thought to be especially close to Pope Benedict XVI, who
intends to make the meta-problem of modern Europe's rootlessness and
self-destruction a central theme of his papacy.
Morse gave a presentation on Europeans' low fertility. The estimated
total fertility rate, i.e. the average number of children born per woman
over the course of her lifetime, in 2005 of the European Union was 1.5,
well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Morse suggested a link between
Europe's rapid trend toward fewer and illegitimate births to
family-replacing social welfare states. After she spoke, Morse said in an
interview, "Amb. Campbell got up and addressed his remarks primarily to
me." Campbell argued that neither the welfare state nor low birthrates
were problems in the United Kingdom. "I didn't want to fight," said
Morse, but "Cardinal Trujillo hopped in. He said we've been tracking
these demographic trends for a long time." Trujillo said that Europeans'
low birthrates were a genuine and severe problem.
The reaction of leftists, ever intent on their bizarre fantasies instead
of reality, was typical. The lefty "Catholic" British magazine The Tablet
called Trujillo "the way backwards" for agreeing with Morse on Europe's
"alleged population crisis."
"There's nothing progressive about ignoring population decline," said
Morse. "Western Europe's birthrates are what demographers call not just
low, but very low. I don't know how you can deny there's a problem." As
Morse noted, there is no serious disagreement on the fertility numbers
among demographic experts. "One thing the ambassador said is that we have
seen population fluctuations before, and we've bounced back," she said.
"This is different. Previous population declines were caused by increases
in the death rate, such as during the Black Death. This is voluntary
extinction." And it shows no signs of reversing itself for now.
Morse reported that Trujillo argued against the contemporary
individualistic conception of society, instead saying that the family
needed social recognition as a unit. He noted that psychologists believe
that a child first becomes aware of his own separate existence only
through a relationship, the one with his mother. Perhaps, he suggested,
it would be more accurate to say, instead of "I think, therefore I am,"
that "I am loved, therefore I am."
It's a bit of a puzzle why the lowest birthrates in the world outside of
Japan are to be found among the traditionally Catholic peoples of Italy,
Spain, and France (France's relatively high birthrate of 1.7 is due to her
very large Muslim population). Morse offered a possible hypothesis.
"Catholic women are much less willing to become unmarried mothers, to do
the Swedish thing of having the state as the father," she said.
In a January 25 article "A Catholic Alternative to Europe's Social Model,"
Morse wrote, "Although some aspects of the Western European model
originally claimed Christian inspiration and objective, it is now clear
that the modern Western European welfare-state is collapsing. And while
many modern countries share some of the problems loosely categorized under
the 'European social model,' it is Europe that most desperately needs a
genuinely Catholic alternative." One example of the statist European
model problems: "The European social model provides high wages and
excellent benefits--for the few who have jobs. The system excludes those
who are not skilled enough to be economically productive. But everyone
begins their lives being not very economically productive. In practice,
this means that the young are kept out of the labor market precisely at
the time they are most biologically suited to begin forming families."
John Allen, the Rome reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, attended
the Acton conference and took note of what Trujillo had to say. "We are
realizing the worst prophecies of aging and demographic implosion, and
European politicians are seeing this with alarm," Trujillo said according
to Allen. "The myth of over-population has collapsed."
Asked why Muslims have such drive and energy while Westerners don't, Morse
said, "Secularism is a compromise, and no one wants to die for a
compromise." Or have enough children to keep their compromised
civilization going. Cardinal Trujillo, at least, seems to understand
this.
Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.
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