Pope Leo XIV urged European leaders on Monday to get in gear and address the continent’s demographic crisis by reinforcing the family and affirming the dignity of human life.
The pope’s call to action comes amid a severe demographic collapse that threatens not only Europe’s social and economic stability but the cultural identities and destinies of various nations.
‘A rejection of the Christian inspiration of the founding fathers of the EU institutions has led to a time of drastic sterility.’
The number of live births in Europe per 1,000 persons in 1970 was 16.4. By 2024, the crude birth rate had fallen to 7.9.
According to Eurostat, the European Union’s total fertility rate — the average number of kids born to a woman over her lifetime — stood at 1.34 live births in 2024. Of the children born that year, nearly one in four have a foreign-born mother.
The fertility rate necessary for a population to maintain stability and replenish itself without requiring replacement by foreign nationals — what is referred to as replacement-level fertility — is 2.1.
Even when factoring in Europeans’ replacement by foreigners, statisticians project the EU’s population will fall by 11.7% between now and 2100 — from roughly 452 million to 399 million. Among the countries expected to thin out are Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Poland, projected to suffer population declines of 19.3%, 24%, 30.1%, and 31.6%, respectively.
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In his address this week to European officials, including members of the European Parliament’s Intergroup on Demography, Pope Leo stressed that the continent’s demographic crisis “stands as a crucial juncture for the anthropological, social, and economic future of Europe.”
Echoing his predecessor, Pope Francis, Pope Leo said that Europe is not becoming the “old continent” because “of its glorious history, but because of its advancing age.”
After emphasizing that “children are the future,” Pope Leo noted that “a rejection of the Christian inspiration of the founding fathers of the EU institutions has led to a time of drastic sterility, not only because too many have been deprived of the right to be born, but also because there has been a failure to pass on the material and cultural tools that young people need to face the future.”
In addition to faulting the Europeans for increasingly abandoning their Christian roots, the pope reprimanded them for Trojan-horsing the means of their demographic demise into policies advertised as “family-friendly” — policies that he said “simultaneously promote discrimination against motherhood, exalt abortion as a right, and undermine the very foundation of the desire to start a family.”
To both address the demographic challenge at hand and counter the “two extremes of excessive state intervention and individualism,” the Roman pontiff noted that Europeans must respect and promote the central place of the family — which “is founded on marriage between a man and a woman” — and apply the principle of subsidiarity.
“Only a fresh springtide for the family can transform the winter chill of our aging populations,” said the pope.
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