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Demographics catch up to Italy
ROME, September 22, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Europe will grow more "Islamicized" if Christian Europeans do not start having more children, and going back to Church, a senior Vatican official said this month. Msgr. Piero Gheddo, a famous missionary and an official with the Vatican's Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, told Zenit news service that Europe's indigenous inhabitants have abandoned Christianity and are becoming "paganized."
"The fact is that, as a people, we are becoming ever more pagan and the religious vacuum is inevitably filled by other proposals and religious forces," said Msgr. Gheddo, who founded AsiaNews, the Christian missionary news service. As religious practice diminishes in Christian Europe, "indifference spreads; Christianity and the Church are attacked."
"If we consider ourselves a Christian country, we should return to the practice of Christian life, which would also solve the problem of empty cradles."
Mark Steyn pointed this out previously: remember the Norman Rockwell styled painting of the big Italian families around the dinner table? The many children, grandma and grandpa ready to tuck into the pasta, the beaming mother, the proud father, the cousins, etc?
It's a myth today. The only way to have a dinner like that is to hire movie extras.
Italians, for reasons of secularism, despair, and apathy, aren't bothering to have families. It's all about self-fulfillment. That's nice but at some point you either believe that you have a society and culture worth perpetuating, or you don't.
The Italians don't. |
Msgr. Gheddo pointed to demographic statistics showing that the population of native Italians is decreasing by 120,000 or 130,000 a year "because of abortion and broken families." At the same time, 200,000 legal immigrants a year are moving into Italy. More than half of these, he said, are Muslims who continue to have the large families that Italians now eschew.
"Newspapers and television programs never speak of this," he said. "However, an answer must be given above all in the religious and cultural fields and in the area of identity."
| Newspapers won't speak of it indeed -- first, the reporters and editors agree that Italian culture and society aren't worth perpetuating, and second, they themselves have both into the current apathy. They're likely to be childless or with one and only one child. It's not a surprise. To speak of it also raises the risk of going outside the 'narrative' (being un-PC if you will) -- the narrative of "West, bad, all other cultures, good". One can't do that and work in the MSM. |
Msgr. Gheddo was responding to the taunts of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who angered many on a recent official visit to Italy when he said that Europe should convert to Islam. He gave a lecture to 500 young women, who had been paid to attend, in which he urged them to convert and offered to find them Muslim husbands in Libya.
| And jobs as bodyguards ... |
The comments were denounced by Archbishop Robert Sarah, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, who called them a "provocation."
| The good bishop is just being a neanderthal, backward, bigot. He'll be re-educated in the near future. |
But Msgr. Gheddo warned that the provocation could well have been a mere prediction.
"No newspaper -- except Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Episcopal Conference -- has seriously taken into consideration how to respond to this challenge of Islam, which sooner or later will conquer the majority in Europe," he said.
Islam is just one facet of the challenge -- there will be a vacuum in Europe, and that vacuum will be filled. If the Huns and Visigoths were still around and heading east from the steppes of Asia, they would be the ones to fill that vacuum, and western cities would once again be sacked. Instead the pressure will come from Africa. Most, but not all, of the people who move into Europe will be Muslims. That 'most' will be enough to create a Eurabia.
But the fundamental challenge is whether Europeans, as they presently are, believe that they have a culture worth preserving, nurturing and carrying forward into the next several generations. It's an open question, and many Europeans would point to their history over the past millennium, particularly the 20th century, and respond in the negative. |
Recent surveys conducted in Italy by local Catholic dioceses have found that the much-quoted number of Italians claiming to attend Mass weekly, 30 percent, can be deceptive. In Venice, it was discovered that the number of those actually attending is closer to 18 percent, and the numbers drop dramatically among younger Italians.
| Young Italians haven't been nurtured in the Church -- indeed, they haven't been nurtured in much of any belief at all except the usual socialistic garbage that's been proffered the last fifty years. It's no wonder that they're not inclined to attend Church and have little in the way of fixed beliefs. Qaddafi is unfortunately right in one way: he understands that when the battle is between something and nothing, something almost always wins. In this case the something is Islam, which offers people something to believe, versus secularism, which offers nothing. |
Although the Italian birth rate has crept up in recent years, from being the lowest in Europe at 1.2 children per woman, it still sits at only 1.31, a level sometimes referred to by demographers as the "death spiral," in which a society's population will inevitably begin to shrink.
Piero Gheddo is the author of over 80 books on the conditions of people in the developing world, with the first being published in 1956. In a recent blog post, Fr. Gheddo, who refers to himself as a "missionary journalist," decried the closure of Christian youth facilities and churches and the deterioration of schools and family life due to high Italian divorce rates.
What, he asks, has the "so-called 'secular morality' thing" done for young people?
"It replaced the [Church-run youth facilities] with the clubs that many call centers of distribution of alcohol and drugs." Secularism has created a culture in which teenagers run wild, a new phenomenon in Italy. The culture promoted in these clubs, he said, is one in which "perversion and chaos and spiritual emptiness reign supreme."
| That's the nothing-ness of current socialism and secularism. We've created a void. |
"Drugs, alcohol, free sex and psychedelic music for hours at high volume are some 'diversions' that kids seek and find allowed in these places, which are sometimes encouraged and financed by local governments."
"All this is the fruit of our civilization ever more distant from God and then from the education of young people."
One need not be a Christian, or a European, to find the trend of Europe, socialism and secularism profoundly disturbing. It is what the progressive Left would do to the United States, and indeed, it's very much along the lines of what our present administration would like to advance.
Secularism and socialism can't offer a life that can answer fundamental questions in peoples' souls. Whether a secular, socialist society dies in war and apocalypse or whether dies in a demographic whimper, die it will. |
Posted by: Steve White 2010-09-24 |
