A few years ago, I walked into the Church of Santa Maria del Carmelo in Traspontina, between the Tiber River and the Vatican, and witnessed something pretty rare: a baptism.
Rome has a below-average birth rate for Italy, which has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, itself in the midst of a baby bust.
WHAT POPE LEO’S NAMESAKE TELLS US
The total fertility rate in Lazio, the region that contains Rome, is 1.17 babies per woman, a tick below Italy’s 1.18 birth rate. The European Union’s birth rate is 1.38 per woman. (And forget about the Vatican, where almost nobody is having babies.)
So when Pope Leo XIV met for the first time with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and brought up five areas of concern for him, the central one was the lack of Italian baby-making.
Here is Leo’s speech from the visit.
He began the substantive part of his speech by saying, “As is sadly evident, we live in times when, alongside many signs of hope, there are many situations of grave suffering that are affecting humanity worldwide and require urgent and far-sighted responses.”
Leo then discussed five problems that call for collaboration between the Italian state and the Catholic Church.
Confronting war and advancing peace was the first, and the second was “the urgent issue of caring for our common home” — the environment.
Central to the five problems was the birth rate. Specifically, he called for a more family-friendly society and a more pro-life ethic. Here are the pope’s words on that:
“In recent decades, as we know, Europe has witnessed a significant decline in the birth rate. This requires a commitment to promoting family-friendly choices at various levels, supporting their efforts, promoting their values, and protecting their needs and rights.”
“‘Father,’ ‘mother,’ ‘son,’ ‘daughter,’ ‘grandfather,’ and ‘grandmother’ are, in the Italian tradition, words that naturally express and evoke feelings of love, respect, and dedication, sometimes heroic, to the good of the domestic community and therefore to that of society as a whole. In particular, I would like to emphasize the importance of ensuring all families the essential support of dignified employment, under fair conditions and with attention to the needs of motherhood and fatherhood. Let us do everything we can to give confidence to families, especially young families, so that they can look to the future with serenity and grow in harmony.”
“Within this framework, we see the fundamental importance, at every level, of respecting and protecting life, in all its stages, from conception to old age, up to the moment of death. I hope that this awareness will continue to grow, also with regard to the accessibility of medical care and medicines, according to each person’s needs.”
Leo mentioned immigration and respect for tradition as his last two concerns.
The late Pope Francis also spoke about the birth rate. It’s the most important problem of our age, not just in Italy or Europe, but worldwide, so expect to hear more about it.