Aging World with an aging heart by self centered culture.
In recent decades Europe, leader of modern secular culture,
and other countries of the Asian continent have aged and the stress of their
population control principles has already affected entire economies, after
having swept the Christian social culture of Europe. The problem is now so
serious that Governments have adressed the emergency, but with the same bureaucratic
methods used to solve other social
problems: campaigns advertising and incentives so that couples have children.
But it seems that these marketing efforts are not working and the answer and
solution are, paradoxically, in the Christian culture that they spurned in the
past.
Italy, Denmark and Taiwan are some of the countries who are
in despair, along with New Zealand, which have used a slogan of "Let's
mate, mate" to promote fatherhood. Even China has softened its policy of
one child to improve its demographic base and Singapore has offered monetary,
fiscal and services incentives that reach up to 90,000 Singapore dollars for
each child up to the age of 13.Other countries like South Korea, in 2010, cut the
electricity in the offices so that people went home early to “produce babies”
tried to convince parents with posters like the following, from the negative
effects of not having brothers. (1)
If the promotion is made and material support is given, why
is it not working?
The reasons can be found at the core of the same campaigns
and principles that were used decades ago to achieve the reduction of the
population and that the Christian faith pointed as worrying and harmful for
families.
Stuart Gietel-Basten, an Oxford Professor, explains several
of thed reasons not to have children and warns they will be difficult to deal
with just advertising campaigns. Among them, it is the logical economic
uncertainty, the concern to keep a job. But he discovered other cultural and
social reasons that will be very
difficult to reverse. Among these is the concern of women be able to combine
work with motherhood and the stress of
the double-shift it represents, as well as many labour structures that discriminate
pregnant women and the loss of the ability of people to live in large groups for
most of them have grown up in families with a single brother. (2)
If we analize these reasons, we find that many of them have
been caused by the same extreme individualistic, materialistic and
environmentalist culture that was initially used to educate couples to have
fewer children. This has already been absorbed by the last generations into a
lifestyle focused on oneself.Other reasons which exhibit even more the soul of
this culture are:
• effects on the physique of women and negative stereotype
of pregnancy.
• Fear the reduction in sexual performance.
• Lack of social support structures (which before was the
family).
• Belief that it is wrong to bring the world to an unwanted
child • deep belief that it is immoral to bring children into the world by
overpopulation, pollution and cataclysms.
• Reduction of the concept of pure professional development
success.
• Devaluation of motherhood and superiority of the female
productive labor.
• The delegitimation of motherhood as occupation and
pleasure produced by the women. (3)
The Catholic faith has always insisted on the effects that
this self centered culture would thus bring to the communities and to the whole
world. An effect of aging not only by age but by the lack of hope that renews the
possibilities of the future.
Since the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" of blessed
Pope Paul VI to the Pope Francisco the Church has underlined the essential
ideas that have to be protected to preserve not only population health in the
world, but also the personal, emotional, and social health of all humans:
"The joy of the children makes throb the hearts of parents and
reopens the future. Children are the joy of family and society. They are not a
problem of reproductive biology, or one of many ways to perform. And they are
much less a possession of parents." (4)
Pope Francis
Ana Elena Barroso
°mujer_catolica
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