De-population, not over-population.

Rome -- Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council on the Family was the keynote speaker at a family conference in Rome in mid-January. Francis Campbell, Ambassador of the United Kingdom to the Vatican, had earlier reported that fertility rates were cyclical, and that the current state merely reflects such a cycle.

Not so, replied Cardinal Trujillo. He assured the audience that his office had been gathering world-wide demographic data for a long time, and the trends are devastating. "We are realizing the worst prophecies of aging and demographic implosion, and European politicians should be seeing this with alarm," said the Cardinal. "The myth of over-population has collapsed."

Jennifer Morse, Senior Fellow in Economics at the British Acton Institute, sponsor of the conference, agreed completely with Cardinal Trujillo. "Fertility rates have been falling for decades.... This is not a short-term phenomenon that can be easily reversed. Rather, the decline in fertility is a complex phenomenon in which economic incentives and cultural attitudes are deeply intertwined.... The churchman (Cardinal Trujillo) is taking a much more realistic position than the politicians ... who are whistling past the graveyard, dodging reality at all costs" (LifeSiteNews.com, Jan. 31, 2006).

Comment: The editor of the London weekly The Tablet, Catherine Pepinster, did not like this one bit. In the paper's now true and tried, 40-year-long tradition of dissenting from Catholic family morality, she hailed Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., former Master of the Dominicans, for rejecting the Vatican's document against homosexuals in the seminary, noted this as a "hidden schism" dating back to Humanae vitae (1968), and blasted Cardinal Trujillo for his disagreement with the British ambassador on European demographics, adding that the Cardinal had also "met with ridicule a while ago when he claimed a scientific consensus ... that the HIV-AIDS virus could pass through the walls of a condom" ("Sex please, we're Catholics," Feb. 4, 2006).

Sorry, Ms. Pepinster, but you had better consult some real scientific sources, because the Cardinal is right on both counts.