By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Sep 25, 2024
If you count the flight home, Pope Francis made two shocking statements during his recent trip to Asia and Oceania: first telling an audience in Singapore that all religions are paths to God, then suggesting that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are morally equivalent. Those two statements were of course highly questionable, and have been widely questioned.
But before we forget the papal voyage and turn our attention to other subjects, could I point out a third controversial statement that the Pontiff made—and the media coverage generally missed?
“How wonderful that here in East Timor there are so many children,” Pope Francis said during a homily preached at an outdoor Mass on September 10.
That sentence is not taken out of context—not the sort of line a friendly pastor might toss off to calm down parents of restless children in the congregation. The Pope’s entire homily was about children and birth. In a meditation on the day’s reading from Isaiah (“A child has been born for us, a son given to us”), the Pope remarked that the arrival of a child is “a shining moment of joy and celebration,” a sign of hope.
At the end of the Mass, Pope Francis returned to that theme in impromptu remarks. “I hope you continue to have many children,” he told the faithful of East Timor. He warned them to be wary of foreign influences that might change their attitude toward children, of those who “want to change your culture, want to change your history.”
The mainstream media in the West paid scant attention to the Pope’s natalist message (perhaps because the editorial slant of most major media outlets favors those foreign influences that the Pope decried). But consider how rare it is for a major public figure from Europe to advise a Third World audience to keep having lots of babies. The ideology of Planned Parenthood and Zero Population Growth holds sway in the Western world. And since that ideology has always been heavily infected with racism, the West has come to discourage the birth of babies, but especially the birth of brown and black and yellow babies.
Even Pope Francis himself has in the past scolded the parents of large families, advocated “responsible parenthood,” and—in an insulting barb that offended countless members of his flock, rejected the idea “that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits.”
But the world is belatedly awakening to the reality that our problem is not overpopulation but underpopulation. In most of the world, especially in the affluent West, the fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level, and a population bust is looming, with dire consequences for the world economy. The normal historical pattern of gradual population growth prevails today only in sub-Saharan African and a geographical belt across southern Asia—in mostly poor societies, where the birth of a child remains a sign of hope even under adverse conditions.
East Timor lies at one end of that population-growth zone, where the proponents of what the Pope terms “cultural imperialism” have not yet fully convinced the natives to stop reproducing. And even Pope Francis, who has shown so little sympathy for large families, recognized there that the presence of so many babies and toddlers is one strong indication of a healthy culture.
Perhaps not coincidentally, East Timor is the most heavily Catholic country in the world today (if you exclude Vatican City, where for obvious reasons the fertility rate is not an issue). Although badly battered by an extraordinarily damaging sex-abuse scandal, the Church still counts 98% of the country’s people among her faithful. A strong Catholic culture should resist the blandishments of the population-control zealots. In East Timor, it seems, the Pope saw it happening.
Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.
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