Article originally published at https://www.acistampa.com/story/32519/la-chiesa-alla-prova-della-guerra-demografica-il-rapporto-2025-sulla-dottrina-sociale-della-chiesa
On the issues of life and family, the Church seems to have lost its prophetic thrust, its will to engage in battle with the world . This is what the Van Thuan Observatory for Social Doctrine in the Church denounces in its annual report, which this year has a specific and almost disturbing theme: ” The demographic war. Do they want us extinct? “
The approach of the Van Thuan Observatory is scientific, as usual, and the essays in the report take us on a journey that is yet to be discovered, which shows not only how the anti- natalist lobbies have forcefully entered the scene, but also how the Church has emerged from it, in some ways, a little fascinated, a little drawn into a debate that does not seem to want to go into opposition.
From the history of the right to abortion – with the Soviet Union being the first nation to legalize it – to that of eugenics, a term in common use before the Second World War and banned only because of the horrors of Nazism, but forcefully returned in other forms, up to the excesses of euthanasia.
The introductory essay by Riccardo Cascioli and Stefano Fontana is a fairly comprehensive summary of its contents. Cascioli points out that the Church was once ready to denounce all violations of the right to life, but then, in recent years, “there has been a cooling of the Church’s will to fight on these fronts,” to the point that “the insistence on the negativity of contraception has greatly diminished in tone and the thesis that Paul VI’s condemnation in Humanae Vitae can be reformed is spreading, a revision that has already de facto occurred .”
Cascioli and Fontana also note that, although abortion is still strongly condemned, “attention to the very sad phenomenon has lost focus and the whole issue has been relegated to the background”, while other interests such as “poverty and care for the environment” are gaining ground, while the strong denunciations on the issues of life that have resounded since the time of John Paul II are lacking.
But Cascioli and Fontana also underline the “serious failures” with regard to homosexuality and transsexualism, in which ” a problematic pastoralism has muted the announcement of doctrine and in many cases we have even witnessed a revision of the same “, while the voice of the Church “has become fragmented, weakened and confused” when it comes to euthanasia and assisted suicide.
The report’s theme is, first and foremost, political. Ultimately, population policies are intertwined with birthrate policies, transcending the view of procreation as an individual matter , but placing it within a broader framework that concerns the common good.
The report highlights how population phenomena are not spontaneous in nature, but are a “political planning by order of those in power”, with various subjects, even non-political ones (such as various NGOs), who engage in politics.
Cascioli and Fontana write: “ If Belgium legislates to allow the euthanasia of newborns, if the British parliament extends the right to abortion up to the last month of pregnancy , if in all French schools it intends to impose the “EVARS” project ( Éducation à la Vie Affective et Relationnelle et à la Sexualité ), which aims to educate from childhood on the normality of every type of sexual relationship in all its possible forms… it means that the culture of death has made giant strides, while that of life is in serious recession”.
The report also theorizes that, since the 1974 Kissinger report, ” the purpose of globalist planning of birth rates and migration has been to impede the development of certain countries and to guarantee existing balances of power because they are advantageous to the holders of global power,” while “on population policy, economics, medicine, and culture, understood primarily as the organization of widespread mentalities and lifestyles, have become intertwined. There has long been a fusion of economic interests and liberal-progressive political ideology, politically managed and planned.”
And the main fact is that ” all the great perverse ideologies of modernity have waged war on birthrate. The Church’s teachings focused on birthrate as the primary end of human sexuality, on marriage as the natural ‘place’ for its exercise, on the non-artificial naturalness of procreation and on children as a ‘Gift of God’ and not of human technology, on the unlawfulness of demographic planning conducted by political power.”
What to do then? The opinion of the Van Thuan Observatory , which goes beyond the mainstream, is that the Church and its magisterium must resume their educational work and explain with doctrinal clarity a “series of interconnected issues,” from ” sexual morality to marriage, from the presence of non-negotiable principles to the subsidiary role of the political community with respect to the family and life, from the need to govern migratory processes to that of preserving the last remnants of Christian civilization.”
Ultimately, ” in today’s Church one finds it notably difficult to take into account the entire systemic framework of the problem, to be an educational body on these issues, to play a clear social and political role of guidance and hope .”