Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, said in a recent interview that Pope Francis wants Europe to rediscover its founding principles in order to approach problems — including a looming “demographic winter” caused by low birth rates — with “a forward-looking spirit of solidarity.”
Speaking to Vatican Media the day before Pope Francis’ departure on a trip to Luxembourg and Belgium, Parolin said without the virtue of hope and the deep conviction of God’s help in our lives, “every difficulty, though real, will seem magnified, and selfish impulses will have greater free rein to impose themselves.” He said the Catholic Church and state actors have a responsibility to support families and allow them to give of themselves generously.
“I believe that to counter the dramatic decline in birth rates, a series of actions by distinct actors are necessary and urgent. The Church, states, and intermediate organizations should all become aware of the importance — I would dare say ‘vital’ importance — of this issue and intervene with a series of measures that should be well coordinated, if possible,” Parolin said.
Care must be taken to “carefully [listen] to families to identify their real needs and provide them with help, impacting the concreteness of their lives in order to remove various obstacles to the generous acceptance of new life,” the cardinal said, according to a Catholic News Agency report.
Global fertility has been falling for decades, with the problem often most acute in industrialized nations with higher standards of living, even while the fertility rates in many developing nations with strained resources, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, continue to climb. Many of the world’s most developed countries are well below the “replacement rate” of fertility — generally about 2.1 births per woman over her lifetime — needed to keep a population stable, according to data gathered by the World Bank.
This is not the first time Parolin has addressed the possibility of a “demographic winter” — a dramatic and highly consequential shrinking of population caused by low birth rates. He did so in 2021 in a speech in France where he similarly urged the continent to rediscover its Christian roots.
Pope Francis has himself in the past described the low number of births as “a figure that reveals a great concern for tomorrow.” He has criticized what he describes as the “social climate in which starting a family has turned into a titanic effort, instead of being a shared value that everyone recognizes and supports.”
Pope Francis in 2022 also described cratering fertility rates as a “social emergency,” arguing that while the crisis was “not immediately perceptible, like other problems that occupy the news,” it is nevertheless “very urgent” insofar as low birth rates are “impoverishing everyone’s future.”
‘Europe greatly needs to rediscover its roots’
Cardinal Parolin in his remarks this week asserted that the people of Europe have largely forgotten “the immense calamities of the past,” especially the 30 years leading up to the end of World War II, and run the risk of “falling back into the tragic errors of those times.”
“While in 1945, European peoples were propelled toward a future that could only be imagined as better than the past, today they seem to view the future as an entirely unknown time or even worse than the recent past. This way of thinking affects the very capacity to embrace life and spreads a climate of resignation where hope does not dwell,” Parolin said, referring to spirits of “populism, polarization, and fear” that are on the rise in Europe.
“The Church, ‘experienced in humanity,’ and therefore the Holy Father employ the language of responsibility, moderation, and warning of the risks that can befall if dangerous paths are taken, condemning the most perilous errors. For this reason, such language does not lend itself to easy simplification and does not always present immediate solutions,” the cardinal continued.
“However, the Holy Father’s words originate from the Gospel and are always words of wisdom. They are realistic, as the Gospel is realistic, which does not promise paradise without the cross.”
Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, has shaped the history of Europe in its “cathedrals, universities, art, the development of its institutions, and a thousand other aspects,” Parolin said. The decision to exclude any mention of God in the current European Constitution leads, he said, to “the exacerbation of a certain confusion that does not help in building the European project.”
“Indeed, to find the strength for a new leap that allows reaching new and important goals, overcoming ever-resurgent selfishness, Europe greatly needs to rediscover its roots. If it intends to be a voice that is heard and authoritative in today’s world and if it wants to overcome exhausting impasses, it needs to rediscover the greatness of the values that inspired it, values well known to the founders of modern Europe,” Cardinal Parolin said.
Pope Francis during his ongoing trip will greet royal leaders, prime ministers, professors and students, and Catholics in the two small historically Christian countries of Luxembourg and Belgium, both of which are experiencing steep declines in religious adherence amid the spread of secularization.
After events in Luxembourg today, the pope’s four-day trip will continue in Belgium, where he will visit three cities to mark the 600th anniversary of the Catholic universities of Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve before returning to Rome on Sept. 29.
Cardinal Parolin, who described the Holy Father as a “pilgrim of hope,” said he hopes the pope’s visit “provides an opportunity for a profound reflection on Europe and on the way the Church exists in Europe today.”
“I hope it will be a moment in which believers and nonbelievers have the opportunity to listen to the words of the successor of St. Peter and to compare their way of being and acting in the world with the invitation that comes from the Gospel,” he concluded.
