ROME — Pope Francis on Wednesday praised Indonesia's high birth rate and reiterated his argument that pets should not replace children.
Some countries, the Pope said, “adopt the deadly law of birth control, limiting the number of births, which is the greatest wealth a country can have.” Meetings During his visit to the Muslim-majority country, he met with civil servants and diplomats at the presidential palace in Jakarta.
“On the other hand, in your country you have families with three, four or five children, and this is reflected in the average age of your population,” the Pope continued, pointing out a welcome contrast.
“Please keep going, this is an example for all countries,” he said. “It may seem strange that some families want to have cats and small dogs but not children, but this is not right.”
Indonesian President Joko Widodo responded with laughter, while the Pope Rotated I told him, “That's true.”
Pope Francis is currently on a 12-day visit to four countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the longest of his 11-year papacy and the longest he has spent away from the Vatican since being elected in 2013.
After Indonesia, the 87-year-old Pope is due to visit Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore.
Pope Francis has frequently criticised couples who forgo having children and instead keep pets, linking the trend to falling birth rates in the Western world.
“The other day I spoke about our current demographic winter, where people don't want to have children, or they just want one and no more,” the pope told a group gathered at the Vatican in 2022.
“And a lot of couples don't have kids because they don't want them, or they only have one child, but they have a dog or a cat or two,” he said. “So, the dog or the cat takes the place of a child. So, I know that sounds weird, but that's the reality.”
“And the denial of paternity and motherhood weakens us, dehumanizes us,” he added. “And thus civilizations lose their paternal and maternal richness, they grow old and dehumanized.”
Pope Francis also lamented the continuing population decline in Western countries last spring, arguing that a decline in children was a sign of a lack of hope for the future.
Refuting the “outdated” myth of dangerous overpopulation, the Pope Claimed Humans are not the problem, but rather the solution to the world's problems.
Without naming names, the Pope appeared to be referring to figures such as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who wrote a 1968 essay on eschatology. bestseller Population explosionHysteria ensued about the future of the world and whether the planet could support human life.
Among Ehrlich's most spectacularly wrong predictions were that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s, that an already overpopulated India was doomed, and that “Britain probably won't exist by the year 2000.”
The Pope argued that the root cause of world pollution and hunger is not too many children, but “the choices of people who think only of themselves, the unrestrained, blind and rampant materialism, the delusion of consumerism that, like an evil virus, undermines the existence of peoples and societies”.
“The house becomes filled with things, the children are gone, and it becomes a very sad place,” the Pope added. “There is no shortage of dogs or cats. … These are not in short supply. What is in short supply are children.”
“The problem with our world is not the children we're bringing into the world, it's the selfishness, consumerism and individualism that make people bored, lonely and unhappy,” he said.
According to the Pope, the birth rate is “the first indicator of the aspirations of the people.”
“Without children and young people, the country loses hope for the future,” he said, noting that the average age of Italians has now risen to 47.
Based on these data, “we have to say that Italy, like the rest of Europe, is gradually losing hope for tomorrow,” he said.
“The Old Continent is increasingly becoming a tired, resigned continent, an old continent, obsessed with banishing loneliness and suffering, and not knowing how to appreciate the true beauty of life in a giving civilization,” he said.
The pope's comments sparked a firestorm of criticism on social media, with many taking issue with his statement that couples who choose to keep pets rather than children are “selfish”.
