✣ Highlights from the week online
Has Poland crafted a baby boom? At firstthings.com, Lyman Stone examined the impact of a new policy from Poland’s Law and Justice party, which is trying to boost the country’s birth rate. Since 2015, the state gives Polish families “500 złotys, or about $150, per month for every child they have after their first. For a family with three children, that’s about $300 per month in untaxed cash income”. The government has claimed success: birth rates are indeed rising. Stone suggested caution – it’s not clear what prompted this rise, which actually began before the policy came into effect – but “there was a real recovery in 2016 and 2017, and it may have been helped along” by the benefits programme. Bringing the programme in the US would be hugely expensive, Stone wrote. But “A mixture of financial support and leave time would be helpful, as would reforms to key gatekeepers of the economic life cycle (such as universities) and shifts in cultural attitudes about family, community, and childcare.” If Rousseau had met St Augustine At epicpew.com, Theresa Williams reflected on Benjamin Wiker’s book Saints vs Scoundrels, which asks how history might have been changed if, say, Rousseau could have spoken to St Augustine. “Possibly,” Williams says, “there would have been no sexual revolution, no French Revolution, no Marxist Revolution”.) The book reminds us, Williams, says, that “philosophy made in the image of man will always fall short”. Influential thinkers, when they try to find truth outside Catholicism, often end up merely reflecting their own personalities. Ayn Rand’s “narcissistic view of the world, for instance, was “a mechanism she built to help her cope with her childhood with a family who paid her very little mind”. A website’s warning on the China deal At AsiaNews.it, editor Fr Bernardo Cervellera clarified his publication’s view of the Vatican’s talks with China. “AsiaNews is neither optimistic nor pessimistic,” about a possible deal, “but sceptical”, Fr Cervellera said. The scepticism is about China’s motives. “If the Party programme is one of suffocation and suppression of the faith (of all faith), even through ‘targeted’ appointments of bishops, what motive could Beijing possibly have for this agreement if not that of the suffocation of the vitality of the Church in China?” The “warning signs” are already there, Fr Cervellera wrote: “priests cannot meet with young people; they cannot organise camps and retreats with them; bishops abroad and at home must follow the carbon copy that the Party passes to them; relations with other non-Chinese Catholics are controlled, filmed, and emptied of all meaning”. The right answer, in the view of AsiaNews, is “to wait” – for the Church to quietly build itself up and to hold on for better times.
