A startling query

29 November 2013 | Catholic Herald

(Headline by Catholic Herald)

SIR – Of all the questions in the Vatican Questionnaire, the most startling to me is Question 7f, “How can a more open attitude towards having children be fostered? How can an increase in births be promoted?”

The Royal Society, in its People and the Planet Report 2012, tells us that “Developing countries will be building the equivalent of a city of a million people every five days from now until 2050.”

This has serious effects, as a recent World Fact Book explains: “The addition of 80 million people each year to an already overcrowded globe is exacerbating the problems of underemployment, pollution, waste-disposal, epidemics, water-shortages, famine, over-fishing of oceans, deforestation, desertification, and the depletion of non-renewable resources.”

It may be useful for developed countries with low fertility rates to consider question 7f, but to extend this query to the whole world makes it seem that the Church is ignorant of the huge and continuing population increase threatening the well-being of developing countries.

Is there any way in which the Church and the Royal Society can resolve their differences about this most serious subject?

Gerald Danaher