A new Vatican document decries how childbirth and population growth are viewed by modern society as ‘the major threat to humanity’, urging instead that families must ensure they protect life from conception until natural death.

Laudato Si’ and Amoris Laetitia are hardly the least polemical works of Pope Francis’s pontificate, and thus many will perhaps be surprised that the two have jointly been cited by the Vatican in a move to – amid other things – push back against the attack on the sanctity of life and large families.

‘There is a trend today to regard population growth as the major threat to humanity,’ reads the newly published Integral Ecology in the Life of the Family. ‘Instead, the focus should be on extreme consumerism, pollution, the throw-away culture and the desire to exercise absolute power over the human body by manipulating it, thanks to recent technological breakthroughs.’

There are certain Vatican offices from which, when documents emerge, journalists tend to roll their eyes as yet another lengthy text is published without warning, forcing them to read and summarise a document which realistically most Catholics will never bother with at all. The Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life are two such offices.

On this occasion the two curial bodies – led respectively by Cardinal Michael Czerny and Cardinal Kevin Farrell – have joined together to produce a booklet ‘addressed primarily to families’ but which, the cardinals write, ‘concerns all of us’. In reality this lofty aim may fail, given that its chapters are hardly likely to attract large swathes of readers, with titles such as ‘listening to the cry of the earth’ or ‘ecological spirituality in the family’.

The document seeks to combine Laudato Si’s focus on integral ecology with Amoris Laetitia’s treatment of the family, born out of Pope Leo XIV’s desire to highlight that everything in God’s creation ‘has been wisely ordered from the beginning’, while also remembering that ‘families become privileged places in which to encounter Jesus, who loves us and desires our good’.

In many ways, the positive elements highlighted present no major revelations which the Church has not already offered in her great wealth of social teaching. Nor is the condemnation of abortion and euthanasia a novelty.

What is of note, however, is the fact that the Vatican is issuing this quasi-catechesis for families and seeking to directly counter the secular argument which all too often can take root even among many Catholics. This toxic ideology is of course the proposal that having large families is a negative thing, often described even as harming so-called ‘mother earth’.

Quoting from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, the cardinals wrote that such an ideology is found ‘wherever “there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research”; when governments “work actively to spread abortion, at times promoting the practice of sterilisation” and impose “strong birth control measures”.’

Such a combination of anti-life mentality and anti-family policies ‘leads to a countless number of children never being born, children who were denied the right to the primary gift of creation, the gift of life itself’, the two cardinals lamented.

They also rightly noted that concomitant with such actions among those working to limit family sizes is a ‘fear and hostility towards disability’ and a ‘eugenic mentality’, which sets in when ‘society is disrupted by the attempts “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it”’.

Vatican condemnation of abortion and the anti-life society has been somewhat lacklustre in recent years. While Pope Francis famously described abortion as hiring a hitman, his close friendship with prominent abortion campaigners or abortionists themselves – which did not lead to any change in their view – along with the partnering of the Vatican with pro-abortion groups, somewhat undermined the impact and veracity of his words.

Leo XIV has been forthright in his own condemnation of abortion, using his first State of the World address in January to express the Church’s firm opposition to abortion and the Holy See’s ‘deep concern about projects aimed at financing cross-border mobility for the purpose of accessing the so-called “right to safe abortion”’.

Leo also added how the Holy See ‘considers it deplorable that public resources are allocated to suppress life, rather than being invested to support mothers and families’.

With this new document from the two cardinals – soon to be retiring due to age – the Holy See is thus presenting a united front from both Pontiff and Curia: the Pontiff addressing nations and the Curia addressing families. It is not enough for abortion to be opposed but the ideology which underpins the anti-family society in which the Church finds herself must also be firmly combated.

‘The primary objective must remain the protection of every unborn child and the effective and concrete support of every woman so that she is able to welcome life,’ said Leo in January, and this is what the two dicasteries seek to instruct families about also.

To do this, they recommend that Catholics engage in more frequent ‘positive and age-appropriate conversations about the need to protect human life from abortion, surrogacy and euthanasia’ in order to instruct all ages about the teaching of the sanctity of life.

The document urges families to seek to assist pregnant mothers ‘tempted by abortion’ with counselling and support, while ensuring that the elderly are not siphoned off on to the unofficial track for euthanasia.

It is a positive step, and the very fact that it is coming from these two – often rather theologically dry – dicasteries rather than the Pontifical Academy for Life says more about the tragic downfall of the Academy than anything else.

But herein lies the chief problem with the Vatican’s new text. Released as it was, without warning or fanfare, and from two offices whose work is often largely ignored, the chief danger is that such a catechesis on how to combat the anti-life ideology of our times will never reach most Catholics who need it.

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