Birth Alarm in Italy: for Famiglia Cristiana, we are at risk of extinction.
“We are sliding towards an Italy that risks becoming so demographically unviable that it will never recover.” It's the statistician's cry of alarm Roberto Volpi, author of the essay 'Gli ultimi italiani' (Solferino Libri), interviewed in the issue of Christian Family.
“We have ten, maybe fifteen years to try to save ourselves from this otherwise inescapable fate and to raise the birth rate, which sees us last in the world,” continues the scholar.
In his research he identified the origin of the demographic crisis in the 60s and 70s, which revolutionized social customs in Italy, and links the collapse of births to the collapse of religious marriages: “Religious marriage has always statistically guaranteed more children because it has always taken place at a younger age and therefore with more years of full fertility ahead.
I am not getting into the moral field, I only see correspondences in the numbers between the decline in stable couples and the decline in births. I will leave the causal link to others to discuss. The Church itself, however, has not fully understood the connection between sacramental marriage and Italian demography”.
Finally, he declares himself disappointed by the recent PNRR: "demography was a theme to be placed at the center of government action, at least as much as environmental sustainability. Either we get to work immediately or Italy is destined to an end of consumption."
The urgency and timeliness of this alarm is also clear from the pages of the column Letters to the Father. The director, Don Stephen Stimamiglio, responds to a concerned elderly reader for “the demographic winter that the country is going through”.
Don Stefano underlines the necessity “of a spiritual and cultural conversion, which makes the child be considered a public good, a promise of the future, placing him and his family at the center” .
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Article published on May 13, 2022 - 10:48 pm
