ROME – Pope Francis urged Italians to stop the country’s “demographic winter”, having more children, in an appeal for Sunday of the Day for Life in Italy.
“Today’s Day of Life is celebrated in Italy with the theme ‘Freedom and life’,” said the pope after his weekly Angelus prayer on Sunday. “I join with the Italian Bishops in the reminder that freedom is the great gift that God has given us to seek and achieve our own good and that of others, beginning with the first good of life”.
“Our society must be helped to heal itself from all attacks on life, so that life is defended at all stages,” continued Francisco, in a veiled reference to abortion and euthanasia, two issues to which he frequently returns.
“And I would like to add one of my concerns: the Italian demographic winter,” he said. “In Italy, births have declined and the future is in danger. Let’s take that worry and try to ensure that this demographic winter is over and a new spring for boys and girls will flourish. “
According to the official Italian statistics office (ISTAT), the country’s already low birth rate is dropping to dangerous levels, with total births in 2020 at the lowest level in 150 years since the unification of Italy and projected 2021 to be even lower.
In the five-year period, from January 1, 2015 to January 1, 2020, Italy’s resident population in Italy fell by 551,000. With regard to births, there was a reduction from 576,659 births in 2008 to 420,170 in 2019 and a projection of 408 thousand for the year 2020, once the final figures are available.
For 2021, ISTAT has estimated a new minimum birth record of around 393,000, based on factors such as the declining population of women of childbearing age, Italy’s economic crisis and recent trends in couples’ decision to have children.
“Low fertility (currently 1.29 children per woman in 2019) is the most representative indicator of demographic malaise in our country and the causes of this phenomenon can be attributed to several factors,” said ISTAT.
“Among them is certainly the postponement of the stages of the life cycle that leads to a constant increase in the average age of women with their first child”, he adds, while pointing out that many couples who intend to have children end up postponing and eventually renouncing these plans due to economic and social factors beyond its control.
The pope often comments on Europe’s declining population, comparing the continent to a barren grandmother who has no more children.
Europe, Francisco told the European Parliament in 2014, is often seen as “old and downcast”, as a “grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant”. As a result, the rest of the world looks at him “with indifference, suspicion and even, at times, suspicion,” he said.
The “great ideas that once inspired Europe,” he said, appear to have been replaced “by the technical bureaucratic details of their institutions”.
The birth rate in Europe has plummeted in part because Europeans are overly focused on their personal well-being, the pope said in an interview the following year.
“I heard in my own family, from my Italian cousins here, years ago: ‘No, without children, we prefer to go on vacation or buy a house, or this or that.’ And then, the elderly are alone, ”he said.
“Europe is not yet dead,” he said. “She is a half grandmother, but she can be a mother again.”