Blog of Q's

PRI Weekly Briefing, 3 March 2006, By Joseph A. D’Agostino

Will the Muslims inherit Western Europe?  “If [Western people] don’t do something, probably,” replies Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Senior Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
“That’s a very probable outcome.  The West doesn’t believe in itself.”

After decades of overpopulation hysteria, the realization has firmly dawned on almost everyone paying attention that global birthrates have fallen fast and far, and that Western European nations’ are suicidally lower than replacement level—though their increasingly radical Muslim immigrants’ fertility is high.  It hasn’t dawned on quite everyone, or perhaps British diplomats don’t pay attention to such matters, since the UK’s ambassador to the Holy See dismissed demographic concerns at a recent conference on the family and Centesimus Annus sponsored in Rome by the Acton Institute.  Possibly heralding a new emphasis on the issue, Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council on the Family and keynote speaker at the conference, admonished Amb. Francis Campbell about collapsed European birthrates when the latter said that birthrates are cyclical, and that therefore there is nothing to worry about.

Cardinal Trujillo has spoken about Europe’s fertility decline before, but it is rare for a Vatican cardinal to intervene so firmly at a public event like Acton’s “The Family in the New Economy: Reflections on the Margins on Centesimus Annus,” held January 21 at the North American College.
Trujillo is thought to be especially close to Pope Benedict XVI, who intends to make the meta-problem of modern Europe’s rootlessness and self-destruction a central theme of his papacy…