Cardinal Kevin Farrell has warned of a marked worldwide decline in both infant baptisms and Catholic marriages, using new remarks at a Vatican study day to argue that the Church faces a growing crisis in the transmission of faith within family life. Speaking on April 28 at the Casina Pio IV, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life cited figures from the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2021 showing that baptisms of children under seven fell by 31.1 per cent between 1991 and 2021, while Catholic marriages dropped by 48 per cent over the same period.
Farrell said those figures should not be treated simply as a cause for discouragement, but as a summons to renewal. Even so, the diagnosis he offered was stark. The family, long regarded by the Church as the primary place in which faith is handed on from one generation to the next, is no longer transmitting belief with the strength it once did.
The cardinal made the remarks during a Vatican study seminar on marriage, faith and the Church’s teaching office, an event explicitly focused on how priests are formed to accompany young people, engaged couples and married families in a changed cultural climate. The Dicastery had announced beforehand that the day would concentrate on priestly formation in relation to marriage and family life.
In Farrell’s account, the decline is bound up with much wider cultural change. He said family formation has been reshaped by profound shifts in modern life, with marriage increasingly regarded less as a definitive covenant than as a provisional personal experiment. Cohabitation, he suggested, is often now treated as the almost obligatory test of a relationship before any stronger bond is contemplated.
That cultural shift, he argued, has left the Church facing urgent pastoral questions. Bishops visiting Rome, he said, have spoken of serious difficulty in reaching baptised families who no longer practise the faith. Requests for Church weddings often come, in his telling, without mature faith or a clear grasp of the sacramental meaning of marriage, and in some cases with scarcely any evident disposition towards belief at all.
For that reason, Farrell warned that solid theological teaching on marriage is not enough on its own. Seminaries and pontifical universities may offer sound doctrine, he said, but that formation risks remaining abstract unless it is joined to the concrete realities of family life and the cultural conditions in which young people now live.
Other speakers at the gathering sharpened the point. Fr Andrea Bozzolo, rector of the Pontifical Salesian University, called for pastoral formation that combines biblical and theological depth with close attention to lived experience, including the emotional and sexual education of adolescents and young adults. Fr Fabio Rosini, professor of homiletics and pastoral theology, warned against a model of priestly formation cut off from real life, arguing for a more explicitly instructive and formative language in catechesis.
Farrell’s larger concern was that the Church must learn again how to accompany couples towards an experiential maturity in faith rather than merely repeating doctrine in didactic form. Citing the Pope, he said faith in the family is transmitted “together with life, from generation to generation”, and insisted that the Church must stand alongside families in that work without trying to replace them.
The significance of the warning lies not only in the scale of the decline, but in what it implies for the Church’s future. A steep fall in baptisms and sacramental marriages suggests more than shifting social custom; it points to a weakening of Catholic practice at the very places where the Church ordinarily expects belief to be embodied, taught and renewed. Farrell’s answer was not resignation, but a call for priestly formation and pastoral practice more closely fitted to the realities of the present age.
