Seeing how Jason set me up so well with his previous post, I thought it might be a good time to start my contributions with this article I published in a student magizine, Lumen Vincens, back in August. This is assuredly one of the great issues of our time, and will grow in greater and greater importance as the years go by. I have reprinted the article below with no alterations in the hope that our wide and learned readership might post some comments to help me refine it. The population data are mostly my own calculations from the CIA Factbook and US Census data.

Please, let me know what you think!

Procreate and Dominate

Many commentators on American, Western, and global conditions in the last twenty-five years have issued sharp pronouncements on the decline in culture, values, and morality visible everyday to concerned citizens and particularly to conscientious Catholics. Several of these have gone on to expose the lies of the current status quo as embodying an ideology which runs against the intrinsic nature of humanity, and have rightly declared it to be the Culture of Death. This philosophy of living, or, more accurately, not living, seeks to amputate man from his constituent parts: his body, his intellect, his soul, and his community. Contraceptive mentalities urge lovers to forsake the proper ends of union to seek selfish and divisive pleasure, employing the body as a subordinated instrument for that important but decidedly secondary end. This same action intends to place the mind or animus of an individual at the pinnacle of existence, while homosexual “unions” and cohabitation, besides other effects, both blatantly ignore the very real community-oriented aspects of marriage. Prophets of the age, embodied best in Pope John Paul II, have countered by illuminating the glories of the Culture of Life, and to their chorused voices let us add a harmony. If we are truly pursuing this ideal, then it’s time to take off the gloves and get in the game. In order to have a Culture of Live we need to have lives, and have them in bunches. Procreate and Dominate.

Now, this advice may seem simplistic or even crass, but take a look at the numbers. The outlook for the survival of the “Christian” West has been looking bleak for years, and never worse than now. Fertility rates in Europe and the West have plummeted in the last thirty years, and there is no longer a single country in Europe where citizens are having enough children to replace themselves when they die. The fertility rate (the total bundles of joy per woman) in France is 1.85, Greece 1.33, the United Kingdom 1.66, the European Union averages 1.47, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Italy, with a rate of 1.28, the lowest ever recorded, has become the first country in history where people over 60 outnumber those under 20. By 2050, the home of the Eternal City will be one where 60% of its citizens will have no brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles or cousins. Even Poland, the homeland of JPII and a land where nine out of every ten people are Roman Catholic, produces only 1.39 stork sightings per female. The epidemic does not stop at the Pillars or the Dardanelles either, as Japan has fallen to 1.39, China to 1.72, and the United States at 2.08 is the highest of any wealthy nation.

These figures are staggering. Depressing, frankly. Projected out to 2100, these trends would reduce the population of Europe by 88 million persons, or 23% of the 2000 population. This decline, the outcome of countless factors and holding implications for countless more, cannot be ignored. Just look at the impact on Social Security in the US, forecast to be deficit spending in a dozen years, or the state of the welfare economies of Europe. I leave the economics to people more qualified, but if you have no workers you can’t pay pensions. More concerning, and yet strangely still hopeful, is the underlying cause of this trend that is denuding the human family of its future doctors, lawyers, painters, plumbers, priests and quarterbacks – the Culture of Death. Hopeful? How can it be hopeful? Because every plan conceived by the Enemy carries the very seeds of its destruction.

What does the Culture of Death fear more then all other things? Children. Families. The Love and the Joy shared between a man and a woman properly participating in the awesome creative act of the Creator Himself. This is our best weapon, a weapon we should wield as often as possible. We aren’t here to play nice. We aren’t here to be afraid. We aren’t here to go quietly in the night. We are here to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and to fill it to overflowing with citizens. Overpopulation concerns? Developed land usage in the United States averages only 7.61% across the fifty states - there is plenty of room for all of us. Family planning decisions are to be made by families, not governments. Besides, those poor souls lost in the contraceptive mentality are, more then likely, not going to replace themselves anyway, so Lifers need to be ready to replace not only themselves but their unenlightened neighbors as well. Hello pro-life majority. Hello Social Security solvency. Hello Hope. We out produce them, we keep those we produce, we win.

During His time here on Earth, Christ spoke of the “coming of the Kingdom,” and implied that the faithful would have both the ability and the responsibility to make it happen. In my humble opinion, His message is clear: World domination. What is left to the faithful then, is to find the way most suited to the accomplishment of that goal within Divine Providence. Need we look further then Genesis? The very first book of the bible in its first chapter tells man to “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” Translation: have a whole bunch of fruits and conquer the world. I do not ask you to take a pledge or sign a petition, but rather to understand that you are a necessary soldier in a conflict for the soul of a civilization and a tradition that are fading, and there are all kinds of one, two, three, and four year old ways you can help the cause. If you’re not picketing, you better be producing.