DISQUISITIONS ...being thoughts on Synod 2015 from various observers
Eurocentricity, Demographic Winter and the Synod
During the first week’s work of Synod-2015, numerous Synod fathers have commented on what seems to them the Eurocentric character of the Instrumentum Laboris, the Synod’s basic working document now being digested in the circuli minores (the Synod’s language-based discussion groups) as well as commented upon in the Synod’s general assemblies. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia also remarked on this curiosity in his comments at the Synod press conference of October 7. In sum, the concern is that the Instrumentum Laboris – and thus the Synod’s speeches and debates – tend to focus too much on concerns brought to the Synod from the First World (the “Kasper Proposal;” the question of the Church’s stance toward civil unions for same-sex couples; the authority – if any – of national conferences of bishops to make pastoral provisions for the divorced and civilly remarried that are dramatically different from those in other sectors of the world Church). The parallel concern, evident especially among African and Asian bishops but also among some from the Americas, is that the experience and concerns of the Church in the developing world are getting shorter shrift than they deserve. The first concern is sometimes specified with more geographic and ecclesial precision, and the question thereby sharpened: Why are issues of primary concern to northern European countries so prominently a part of the Synod’s work, when those countries, for all their noble history, are now among the most religiously desiccated places on the planet? Is there something a little strange about dying local churches instructing living, vital, local churches on what “the issues” involved in the 21st-century crisis of marriage and the family really are? Doesn’t this Eurocentricity cut against the Holy Father’s desire, stated on many occasions, that the Synod range widely in its discussion of this pastoral challenge? These questions have not gone unnoticed. At least one Synod father, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, has taken public umbrage at the suggestion that the synod risks becoming too Eurocentric. In a Synod devoted to issues of marriage and the family, it’s perhaps useful to look farther than church-attendance statistics (which, unhappily, demonstrate the Catholic aridity of too much of western Europe) and open the analytic lens to include the question of fertility. Here, Europe finds itself in a grave crisis indeed. For Europe is now, and for some time has been, in a self-induced demographic free-fall that demographers have dubbed “demographic winter.” The figures are striking, to put it gently. Demographers reckon that the “replacement level” at which a country maintains its population over time requires a “total fertility rate” of 2.1. (According to the World Bank, the TFR is “the number of children that would be born to a woman if she were to live to the end of her childbearing years and bear children in accordance with current age-specific fertility rates.”) Not a single European country had a 2013-14 TFR at replacement level (again, according to World Bank statistics), and some are so far below a replacement level TFR as to find themselves in the bottom quarter of the world fertility league tables: in order of descending TFR, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Lithuania, Estonia, Switzerland, Portugal, Monaco, Latvia, Albania, Spain, Croatia, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. Barely avoiding the bottom quarter, but still below replacement-level (again, in descending rate of TFR) are France, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Finland. These figures are subject to the normal statistical anomalies, and calculating any population’s demographic future is not simply a matter of extrapolating from the present; things can and do change, culturally and otherwise, and TFR rates can change accordingly. But what these statistics tell us about the present situation is unmistakable: Europe is systematically and willfully failing to reproduce itself, with results that already pose serious social, political, cultural and economic problems – problems that will, if present trends continue, only intensify to the point of real crisis, and quite possibly grave fiscal and political instability, in the mid-twenty-first century. As I wrote 10 years ago in a book-length essay on Europe, The Cube and the Cathedral, this Euro-demographic winter is historically unprecedented. There have been spasms of depopulation before, but they had previously involved natural disasters, plagues (e.g. the Black Death), or wars (e.g. the Thirty Years War). None of these conditions obtains in Europe today, and none of them has obtained for decades. Europe in the second decade of the 21st century is healthier, wealthier, and (with the exception of those countries on the immediate borders of Putin’s Russia) safer than it has ever been before. So what explains today’s Euro-demographic winter? There are, obviously, multiple and complex variables in play. Technology, in the form of readily available contraception, is surely one factor. So are changes in the structure of economic life (often requiring two-income families), and in gender roles and expectations. Still, when you add up all the empirical data, there is still a hole in the analytic doughnut: why this extraordinarily low level of fertility, for which the demographers have had to create the neologism “lowest low?” And to fill in that hole, it seems to me that we have to look to the realm of the human spirit. When an entire continent that is – to repeat – healthier, wealthier and more secure than ever before ceases to produce the human future in the most elemental sense of “human future” – by refusing to have children – something is seriously awry. Something has gone dry in the soul. Whatever the economic, ideological and cultural pressures involved, a lack of generosity toward the future is manifesting itself in willful barrenness. And that is, in the broad sense of the term “human spirit,” a spiritual problem. Indeed it is a spiritual crisis. That crisis is one for which the Catholic Church in Europe – the local churches of western Europe for a longer period, and the local churches of the new democracies since 1989 – must accept some measure of responsibility. Thus one of the failures for which Synod-2015 ought to elicit a Euro-Catholic examination of conscience is located precisely here: the Church’s failure to inspire and inculcate an ethic of generosity toward the future that expresses itself by the begetting and raising of children. There is another facet of this knotty and disturbing problem that bears reflection. Beneath some of the proposals being advanced at Synod-2015 from northern European bishops – proposals that were also being pressed at Synod-2014 and in the year between the synods – it is not difficult to discern a wish to re-adjudicate Humanae Vitae (Blessed Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility) and Veritatis Splendor (St John Paul II’s 1983 encyclical on the reform of Catholic moral theology). Leave the latter debate for another day. Here, with an eye on Europe’s demographic meltdown and the role of the Catholic Church in that, it ought to be remembered that, in his encyclical, Paul VI (who by no means taught an ethic of reproduction at all costs) was deeply concerned that a “contraceptive mentality” would result from the technological sundering of the unitive and procreative dimensions of marriage, whose unity and complementarity the Church had long affirmed – a unity and complementarity that would be threatened by ready access to artificial means of contraception. Widely ridiculed at the time as a Hamlet-like pessimist – today, he would be pilloried as a “culture warrior bishop” – Paul VI now looks more and more like a prophet who looked into the signs of his times and saw, clearly, the future dangers encoded therein. Now, as I have suggested in several books, I think the goals of Pope Paul’s teaching would have been better served had Humanae Vitae been framed in the more personalistic categories and vocabulary proposed to the Pope by a commission of Kraków-based theologians assembled by Cardinal Karol Wojtyła. But that’s not the issue here. In terms of prophetic insight, Humanae Vitae was spectacularly right about the effects of the “contraceptive mentality” on the human future, as Pope Francis has readily acknowledged. And it requires wilful blindness, historical obtuseness and/or intellectual pride to deny that, especially when looking at Europe. So if there is going to be a Eurocentric dimension to the discussions of Synod-2015, perhaps the spotlight should focus on the facts of Europe’s deliberate and self-induced demographic winter; on the Church’s complex role in that; and on the pastoral strategies most likely to invite what was once the centre of world-civilisational initiative – and the centre of the world Church – to a more generous view of the future. George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center
