Generational Equity and the Vatican Conclave

[Filius Nullius]

All of the suggestions for dealing with environmental degradation and the post-peak oil world on the various DU discussion fora depend on getting U.S. and world population under control, something that none of the major religious denominations seem to comprehend or be willing to help advance. Lord help us if another reactionary Pope comes out of the Vatican conclave. Unfortunately, I fear that this will be the inevitable outcome since John Paul II appointed most of the current assemblage of cardinals.

My wife is a Catholic, and I have nothing against the Catholic "rank and file" in this country. The Catholic hierarchy of senile old men is another matter entirely. In their blind adherence to the sanctity of human life, they forget entirely about the sanctity of the planet. If we totally foul it up by polluting it to the point that the air, water and food necessary to sustain us becomes toxic or by using up all of the available oil and gas resources that can be produced economically, we will have effectively committed genocide against every generation that comes after us.

Many American Catholics, including my wife, are very enlightened on these issues. However, I do believe that many Catholics in this country have been unwittingly duped and manipulated by the Vatican and protestant religious right and therefore have difficulty seeing the long-term suffering that our continued failure to address the problem of a world population out of control will eventually create. The number of innocent children that are now affected by this misguided religious policy and the inconceivably greater numbers that will suffer in the near future makes the regretable loss of life due to abortion a trade-off that humanity will eventually have no choice but to make. However, every day that we fail to accept the inevitability of this choice magnifies the level of suffering that humanity will eventually face.

It is a shame that the major environmental organizations have been so ineffectual in helping the public to understand how vital it is to the quality of life of our descendants that population control issues be addressed immediately. Perhaps they need to mount a mission to the Vatican to help the next Pope to understand how immoral it truly is for the Catholic Church to stand in the way of bringing world population under control.

[LdyGuique]

1. The world's exploding population has been the subject

of much debate since the ending of WWII. However, the first to really write on the topic goes back to Thomas Malthus in 1798 when he first published, "link:www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html|An Essay on the Principle of Population]." It was a controversial work during that era and has remained so until now, although for different reasons during today's political climate. However, any pioneer thinker should always be acknowledged.

The Core Principles of Malthus:

• Food is necessary for human existence.
  
• Human population, if not checked, tends to grow faster than the power in the earth to produce subsistence.
  
• The effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
  
• Misery is the mechanism that balances human requirements and available resources.
  
• Nature's requirement that the imbalance between demand and supply be resolved forms the "strongest obstacle in the way of any very great improvement of society," and thus makes "the perfectibility of man and society" a theoretical and practical impossibility.
  
• The Principle of Population, i.e., the inevitability of misery due to the power of population to overwhelm resources, provides the mainspring behind the advance of human civilization by creating incentives for progress.

Malthus' ideas were resurrected during the 1950s and have remained with us since.

Even though wars of all types have successfully kept population somewhat in check during the 20th Century, population still grew to the 6 billion dollar mark by the end of the century (it actually has tripled since 1950 from 2 billion).

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century (1993)
"Lives deliberately extinguished by politically motivated carnage": 167,000,000 to 175,000,000
Including:
War Dead: 87,500,000
Military war dead: 33,500,000
Civilian war dead: 54,000,000
Not-war Dead: 80,000,000
Communist oppression: 60,000,000

Source: Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness: Estimated Totals for the Entire 20th Century

The Roman Catholic Church has been the loudest and most consistent voice about no contraceptions, no morning-after pill, no abortions. The Fundies picked up the chant only within the past couple of decades. As the recent publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment points out -- humans had bred like rabbits and are destroying their entire world environment at such a rapid rate that the only turn-around may come from huge disasters that are looming on our horizon. They say it much nicer than I did.

There was a United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo during 1994. It grew very contentious, especially as the RCC weighed in. Although, in the quote from the PJP2 concerning the conference, he doesn't issue an adamant stance against birth control -- he leaves it as a personal choice issue to be decided by the family.

Today the duty to safeguard the family demands that particular attention be given to securing for husband and wife the liberty to decide responsibly, free from all social or legal coercion, the number of children they will have and the spacing of their births. It should not be the intent of governments or other agencies to decide for couples, but rather to create the social conditions which will enable them to make appropriate decisions in the light of their responsibilities to God, to themselves, to the society of which they are a part and to the objective moral order. What the church calls <responsible parenthood> is not a question of unlimited procreation or lack of awareness of what is involved in rearing children, but rather the empowerment of couples to use their inviolable liberty wisely and responsibly, taking into account social and demographic realities as well as their moral criteria. All propaganda and misinformation directed at persuading couples that they must limit their family to one or two children should be steadfastly avoided, and couples that generously choose to have large families are to be supported.

In defense of the human person, the church stands opposed to the imposition of limits on family size and to the promotion of methods of limiting births which separate the unitive and procreative dimensions of marital intercourse, which are contrary to the moral law inscribed on the human heart or which constitute an assault on the sacredness of life. Thus sterilization, which is more and more promoted as a method of family planning, because of its finality and its potential for the violation of human rights, especially of women, is clearly unacceptable; it poses a most grave threat to human dignity and liberty when promoted as part of a population policy. Abortion, which destroys existing human life, is a heinous evil, and it is never an acceptable method of family planning, as was recognized by consensus at the Mexico City U.N. International Conference on Population (1984). Source: POPULATION CONFERENCE DRAFT DOCUMENT CRITICIZED Pope John Paul II

So, there may be some hope on the horizon for the official stance of the RCC towards its own members.