A 'daft reason' not to have children
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest member of the US Congress, recently said that “young people” were asking themselves whether it was “OK to still have children”, given the threat of climate change.At The Week, Matthew Walther said it was a strange piece of logic. “The conclusion that because ‘the lives of children are going to be very difficult’ at some unspecified point in the future, people should consider not having them is daft.” People who conclude this must already be disinclined to have children. “To live in a world where it’s half a degree warmer,” Walther wrote, “is better than never being born, surely.”
Environmentalists are right that our consumer economy “should be vastly curtailed”. But don’t blame the kids. “The world’s poorest have more babies than the rest of us and are still the least responsible for our present ecological woes.” In any case, children, wherever they are born, “are not to blame for the crimes of adults. The Earth is here for them, awaiting their good stewardship after our own failures pass into history.”
How Kyrgyzstan clung onto the faith
At the National Catholic Register, Victor Gaetan interviewed a missionary priest: Fr Anthony Corcoran, apostolic administrator of Kyrgyzstan. A Muslim-majority country, it strikes a good balance between freedom and security, he says. The government has a commission for inter-religious dialogue. The country’s small Catholic community – between 600 and 1,500 people – includes survivors of Soviet persecution. “In the late 1990s,” Fr Corcoran says, “I met people who had not seen a priest in decades.” He was moved to meet grandmothers who had kept the faith: “They baptised the children, taught them prayers. When possible, one would go to the Baltics to get blessed salts, which could be brought back to make holy water.”
Fr Corcoran said that missionaries often find that three things survive when the faithful have to live without priests: “the Sign of the Cross; keeping the narrative of Christ’s life and our salvation alive in their minds and hearts; and praying the rosary – with their fingers, since most did not have rosary beads”.
Two women told him: “We don’t know the prayers.’’ He “asked them how they prayed, and they pulled out a rosary. Although they did not know the Hail Mary, they held on to the rosary as they prayed. Doesn’t that show how Mary holds on to us?”
Pro-abortion protests are getting violent
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) reports that pro-life vigils are facing physical attacks. In Manchester, three elderly members of 40 Days for Life say they were targeted by an angry individual who “screamed obscenities at the praying pensioners, and sent chairs and leaflets flying”. Tom Gill, who has attended vigils for 15 years, told Mancunian Matters that he had never seen anything like it.
In Nottingham, meanwhile, an assailant reportedly threw “a lumpy yellow liquid” over three people holding a vigil.
