Pope Francis gave an interview to Commonweal recently. Among other things, he identified what he called “Neo-Malthusianism” as a problem that we are dealing with today.
I hadn’t heard of Malthusianism, so I had to Google. According to Google, Malthusianism is the theory that population growth is geometric and that over time, the population will outpace its resources. The pope evidently sees this as wrong. He also said that Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical on birth control, identified this as a coming heresy.
I guess I’m an advocate of malthusianism. In fact, I would say that it rather obvious that this theory has a basis in fact. As we eliminate famine, plague and early childhood deaths, as we eliminate maternal death in pregnancies, the population grows. What kept a lid on it for so long before our time was simply that most babies dies before they were out of early childhood. A great number of women died in child birth, and whole populations were swept away by plague and famine.
It isn’t that people are living longer today. That has not happened. The real change is that more people are living out their full life spans. Most of the people alive today would be dead right now if it wasn’t for modern medicine, better food supplies, and clean drinking water. Modern sewer systems, vaccinations, steady food supply, and the advances in modern medicine are allowing the human race to grow in exponential numbers.
If that is malthusianism, so be it.
Pope Francis seems to be talking about something a bit different from the Google definition of things. He abhors the utilitarian attitude toward human beings, in which people are regarded as throw away. If that is what malthusianism is, then I abhor it along with the pope. However, I would question whether birth control has anything to do with it.
People have been reduced to objects to be used, killed and discarded throughout history. The only thing that will and does change this is the Gospel of Christ. It has been a slow kingdom coming, but Christianity has given us and end to slavery (at least in Christian parts of the world) and the rise of the rights of individual people under the law.
This is because of the Gospels. Christianity without the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes, which has become a fashion among certain fallen clergy, is malthusianism as the pope describes it, writ large.
From Commonweal:
What comes to mind is Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae. The great controversy at the time was over the [contraceptive] pill, but what people didn’t realize was the prophetic force of the encyclical, which foresaw the neo-Malthusianism which was then just getting underway across the world. Paul VI sounded the alarm over that wave of neo-Malthusianism. We see it in the way people are selected according to their utility or productivity: the throwaway culture.
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