Francis calls for ‘hope’ to revive plummeting birth rates

The Pope warned that Europe’s declining birth rates show the continent is “slowly losing its hope in tomorrow”.

Addressing a conference in Rome on 10 May, Pope Francis dismissed population studies that treat “human beings as if they were problems” and instead blamed global pollution and hunger on “the delirium of an unbridled, blind and rampant materialism, and of consumerism”.

“Right now, the investments that give the most revenue are the arms factories and contraceptives. One destroys life, the other prevents life,” he said. “What future do we have? It is ugly.”

He described homes “filled with objects and emptied of children, becoming very sad places. There is no shortage of little dogs, cats, these are not lacking. There is a lack of children.”

This echoed remarks he made the previous day in an audience for participants in an event titled “Care Is Work, Work Is Care”, promoted by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

“Everyone has a dog, a cat, everyone, but they don’t have children,” he said, observing that in richer countries “migration comes to help the crisis caused by low birth rates”.

The annual conference on “The General State of the Birth Rate” began in response to the fall in Europe’s fertility, which now stands at 1.5 births per woman (and 1.2 in Italy). This was the third year Francis has addressed the conference.

Calling for “effective policies” to encourage people to start families, he said “a culture of generosity and intergenerational solidarity” would “give the youngest hope for tomorrow”.

These remarks expanded on a reflection in the Bull of Indiction for the 2025 Jubilee year, Spes non confundit (“Hope does not disappoint” Romans 5:5), delivered the previous day at the Lateran Basilica.

Taking hope as the theme for the jubilee, Francis said the virtue entailed “enthusiasm for life and a willingness to share it” but this was threatened by “today’s frenetic pace, fears about the future, the lack of job security and adequate social policies, and social models whose agenda is dictated by the quest for profit rather than concern for relationships”.

He called on Christians to demand “a social covenant to support and foster hope, one that is inclusive and not ideological, working for a future filled with the laughter of babies and children”.

Francis directed that the opening of the Holy Door in St Peter’s on 24 December 2024 would inaugurate the jubilee as “an opportunity to be renewed in hope”.

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