✣ Highlights from the week online
The patriarch who started a baby boom At the Institute for Family Studies website, the economist Lyman Stone explained how Patriarch Ilia II single-handedly started a baby boom in Georgia. The Orthodox leader promised to personally baptise and become a godfather to any third child (or higher) born to a married couple in the country. Since he made this promise a decade ago he has baptised 30,000 babies – 35 per cent of the third-or-higher births. Before the policy, Georgians “weren’t having enough kids to keep the population stable”. After the patriarch’s promise, “the fertility rate rocketed to above-replacement levels and has stayed there for nearly a decade”, Stone said. What’s more, financial incentives for childbearing were introduced in 2013 and their effect was on the birth rate was “substantially smaller”, said Stone. Fertility changes of this kind are extremely uncommon, he said. But Georgia, he noted, is unique: 90 per cent of its 3.4 million citizens are Orthodox and Patriarch Ilia is “widely trusted and respected”. How memes save a bishop from boredom At the Washington Post, Auxiliary Bishop Richard Umbers of Sydney explained how he found the time to make memes. They are simple to do – a simple editing tool, he said, means you can add your own text to a picture. (One of his memes that went viral was of a deer recoiling from an outstretched hand. The text read: “At the Our Father.”) Even though they can go wrong and cause offence, “it’s worth taking the gamble”, he said – “it’s my hope that a well-timed meme can open eyes to eternal truths that, once grasped, will never leave minds and imaginations.” Meme-making “gets to the heart of why I got into this bishop business to begin with”, he said. Much of the job is laborious paperwork. When he gets to “page 64 of a report on occupational health and safety” and reads about the fixing of a broken dishwasher, he thinks about the “wonder and mystery” of his original calling to the priesthood, and imagines the Apostles “leaving their boats and following after Jesus on a great adventure, going out into the world to make fishers of men”. He said: “That’s the way the internet beckons to me – truly a sea without shores.” Nagasaki’s memories of martyrdom “I’ll cut to the chase,” wrote Shaun McAfee at ncregister.com. “Go to Nagasaki.” The city is not just a great holiday destination, but a holy pilgrimage site too. “I call Nagasaki the Rome of the Far East,” McAfee wrote: “it is the site of the greatest of Christian persecutions since the great emperors of Rome brutalised the primitive Church.” As well as the beautiful cathedral, there are sites such as Nishizaka Hill, the place where thousands died, to “[pave] the way for a vineyard in the Far East with their glorious blood.”
