Catholic view on Population
Posted by lthreatt on April 17, 2007
Right before Spring Break we were studying about the world’s population and the factors that determine its size and growth. Yesterday, on April 16, 2007, the
Vatican’s representative in the UN, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, sent a letter to the UN about how the Roman Catholic Church thinks the population issue should be dealt with. In this letter, Archbishop Migliore says that although the population is suppose to stabilize in 2050 at about 9 billion people, we still need to work on keeping the world population from getting out of control. With more people being born and the baby boomers reaching old age, the
Vatican feels that extra attention should be given to them and not forgotten. They urge states to “foster respect for human life in all its stages and to find solutions that are right and just, not merely pragmatic.”
Another way to help the population growth is to assist developing countries become more advanced. One place in particular is the continent of
Africa. Archbishop Migliore feels that giving money for primary education would help the countries of
Africa to be more developed. Another solution is one we talked about in class, elevating the status of women and girls in the community by educating them which would give them more respect, something else to do to help out the family and would help them gain maturity in making parental decisions.
A lot of what the Archbishop wrote in the letter is similar to what we learned in class with a more Catholic moral spin to it. For instance, in our book, it says that developed countries would help give women access to contraceptives, but being the Roman Catholic Church, they believe that education alone would be the only contraceptive needed. And with the aging baby boomers some countries, like Japan, don’t feel it’s the governments job to take care of the old people, but the family; the Vatican feels that the government should act like old people’s families in that regard by caring for them.
Source: Zenit News Agency
mcrane said
I thought that this was really interesting and very relevant to our class discussions. I definatley agree with you when you say that the information in the letter sounds like the information from our book with a moral spin on it. Both stress the importance of education in developing countries, but they have different view on contraception.
sgoetz said
I agree and disagree with the Archbishop’s view on the population problem. I don’t think that education alone will bring the world’s population greater stabiity. I think that a combination of that list we named in class, with other options such as availibility of contraceptives, oppoitunities for women, and an increase in genereal health, are all needed to foster population stability. Of course the Catholic Church does not agree with some of these views, and that is okay, but there is really only so much that the Catholic Church can do to help this issue. Even though I am a non-Catholic, I still believe that there needs to be more than one option to bail us out of this global problem.