The Future Depends on Love

by Fr. Roger Landry - February 13, 2009

We are now in the midst of a campaign by the four Massachusetts dioceses to strengthen Catholic marriages entitled "The Future Depends on Love." This week is a good opportunity — coming as it does between the celebration of World Marriage Day last Sunday and St. Valentine's Day tomorrow — for parishes to assess how they are doing with respect to this crucial initiative.

Marriage is in crisis, not merely because of legal attempts to redefine it, or burgeoning rates of cohabitation, divorce, out-of-wedlock birth rates and other troubling analyses. As so many recent surveys have detailed, it is also suffering a crisis of confidence from within.

Since the future of the Church and of society so much depends on marriage, it's important and somewhat urgent to celebrate the gift and meaning of matrimony and authentic spousal love. World Marriage Sunday, begun in 1981 in Louisiana as "We Believe in Marriage Day" and now supported by 43 U.S. states and the Vatican, rejoices in the mutual committed love of husband and wife, honors their faithfulness and expresses gratitude for all the sacrifices they make to raise a family. St. Valentine's Day is an opportunity for spouses to make that celebration of marital love their own, on a day on which our culture is most supportive of their commitment and the love on which it's based.

One concrete way in which the future really does depend on love concerns the generosity by which couples make love. As is getting increasingly noted, western society is facing a population meltdown of enormous proportions, even and especially in Catholic countries in Europe that are slowly committing demographic suicide. For a population to sustain itself, the average number of children per couple needs to be 2.1. In Spain, the fertility rate is 1.1; in Italy, 1.2, in Germany 1.3; in France, despite the large families of immigrant Muslims, 1.7. By 2050, Germany is expected to lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany and sixty percent of the Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles. Altogether eighteen European countries are reporting more deaths than births. Many cities are going to become Muslim not as a result of jihad but infertility.

Closer to home, things are not much better. While the fertility rate of the United States overall is 2.09, four of the five states with the lowest number of children per couple are in New England. In Massachusetts, the rate is 1.66.

If children are a sign and source of hope, then the failure to replace oneself is a sign of despair. Infertility will also brings all types of extra burdens on society. To look at the situation from an economic point of view alone, as fewer young people enter the work force, there will be decreased productivity; as more people retire, not only will there be higher social security costs on the working generation, but it will also make it harder for young families to afford children on their own. There will be a vicious cycle of economic stagnation and a continued downward spiral in fertility.

We need to ask what are the causes of the plummeting birth rates. Experts point to a few. First, children have become culturally optional; there is no longer a stigma attached to a childless woman. Secondly, they are now deemed economically burdensome; while they were once economic assets on a farm, now they are looked at as voracious consumers who produce nothing until generally after they leave the home. Thirdly, they are technologically avoidable through the use of contraception, without even the cost in former days of disciplining the sex drive; and if contraception fails or is not used, one-third of children end up being slaughtered in the womb before birth.

Various nations are now realizing that their very survival is at stake. In 2006, Russia, which has a 1.3 fertility rate, adopted a ten year plan to reverse its sharp decline in population — about 700,000 a year — that portends to reduce Russia's population by fifty percent by 2050. To launch the program, then-President Vladimir Putin gave all Russians a day off from work and asked them to use it to try to produce Russia's most valuable resource for the future, which is not oil, but children. He also proposed one-time cash grants to mothers upon the birth of a second child, extended maternity leave benefits and increased cash and day-care subsidies the more children they have. With a mixture of levity and seriousness, he said that the Russian Defense Department knows that the main threat to Russia's future is not nuclear war but the low birthrate. Therefore, he concluded, out of love for the fatherland, all Russians had a duty to "love!"

Other countries offer similar incentives. Australia gives a $4,000 bonus for every baby. In Japan, parents receive $4,600 for the birth of a child and another $4,600 stretched out over the child's first decade. Singapore gives $3,000 for the first child, $9,000 in cash and savings for the second and up to $18,000 each for the third and fourth.

Here in the United States, however, little is being done to lessen the burden on families to help them to bear and raise children. A recent article by Dr. Paul Cameron, the head of the family research institute, said that over the course of the last several decades, "we are doing well at generating more wealth but failing at getting married and raising kids.

"We and our leaders have forgotten that sex within marriage is to children as private property is to productivity. Put in purely economic terms, we are trading babies within marriage for women's contribution to the workforce. In 1800, the average US woman had about 7 children, by 1900 it was less than 4, and by 2000 it was 2. This decline was strongly associated with the proportion of women working outside the home. Career women are less apt to get married, less apt to have children when married, and have fewer children when married. There is little doubt that a significant portion of today's prosperity has been generated by so many women in the work force. But what does wealth profit a society if it collapses for lack of children? We have to encourage more women to rear children rather than spend their child-bearing years working."

Cameron proposes three concrete means by which we can start to change the tide, which should take on added urgency as we continue to discuss the future of the economy in Washington.

The first is to give women an incentive not merely to have children — lest we promote the behavior of those like Nadya Suleman — but to have them in a circumstance that will give the children the best shot at being good and productive citizens later. Cameron suggests "a ten thousand dollar child exemption from all federal taxes for married couples raising their own or adopted children. As long as the couple stays married and lives with their children, they would be exempt from income, social security and Medicare taxes on $10,000 of income for each child. This would increase their actual earnings just when children's extra needs strain the family budget."

The second proposal is to create incentives for stable marriages. "A two hundred dollar tax exemption per year of continuous marriage would give married couples who 'hang in there' some financial reward. If people remarried, the exemption would start ticking anew." Stable marriages would be good for kids who are crucial to help our nation to survive and to thrive.

The third is to "change social security so that the married who supported their children until they reached adulthood get more income in old age (and more money with more children). Society should reward the old for service rendered by making the sacrifices to raise quality children — children upon whom all eventually depend."

He concludes his article by saying, "these are changes we could survive with." Since the future really does depend on marital love, his proposals should be given as much consideration here as incentives for the family are wisely receiving in other countries.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.