«There is a fact that a demography scholar told me: at the moment the investments that generate the most income are the arms factory and contraceptives: one destroys life, the other prevents life. And these are the investments that give the most income, it’s bad.” Pope Francis said this in his speech to the General States of Birth. “There is no shortage of dogs and cats in homes, there is no shortage of these, there is a shortage of children,” he added. «Foresight is needed: at an institutional level, effective policies and courageous, concrete and long-term choices are needed. There is a need for greater commitment on the part of all governments so that the young generations are put in a position to be able to realize their legitimate dreams”, declared the Pontiff during his speech in Rome. «It is a question – he explained – of implementing serious and effective choices in favor of the family. For example, placing a mother in the position of not having to choose between work and caring for her children or freeing many young couples from the burden of job insecurity and the impossibility of buying a house. And then – he added – it is important to promote at a social level a culture of solidarity and intergenerational generosity to review habits and lifestyles by giving up what is superfluous in order to give young people hope for tomorrow”.
«The problem is selfishness, children do not bring pollution or hunger»
«In the past – declared Pope Francis – there was no shortage of studies and theories that warned about the number of inhabitants on Earth, because the birth of too many children would have created economic imbalances, lack of resources and pollution. I have always been struck by how these theses, now dated and long out of date, spoke of human beings as if they were problems. But human life is not a problem, it is a gift. And at the basis of pollution and hunger in the world there are not children who are born, but the choices of those who think only of themselves, the delirium of an unbridled, blind and rampant materialism, of a consumerism which, like an evil virus , undermines the existence of people and society at the root. The problem is not how many there are in the world, but what world we are building; it is not children, but selfishness, which creates injustices and structures of sin, to the point of intertwining unhealthy interdependencies between social, economic and political systems”. And finally: «Selfishness makes us deaf to the voice of God, who loves first and teaches us to love, and to the voice of our brothers who are beside us; it anesthetizes the heart, it makes you live on things, without understanding what for; it leads one to have many possessions without knowing how to do good. And houses fill up with objects and are emptied of children, becoming very sad places. There is no shortage of dogs and cats, there is a shortage of children. The problem of our world is not the children that are born: it is selfishness, consumerism and individualism, which make people full, lonely and unhappy.”
