Is this apocalypse just about to happen? Sure. God help us.

The Coming Demographic Winter

by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Catholic convert Charles Moore write in today’s Daily Telegraph about the coming demographic winter.

This is the term for the plummeting birth rate in developed world and the catastrophic economic and social effects.

He highlights P.D.James’ novel The Children of Men–a dystopian novel that, I predict, will become increasingly famous as her predictions prove true.

James was a friend of Moore’s and a serious Anglican Christian. He reminisces:

Phyllis James, whom I knew quite well for 25 years or more, was, in her own words “superbly taught in the old grammar school tradition, scholarly, Christian, liberal”. She clung to all these qualities in adversity – a hard, poor father who thought girls should not go to university and made her leave school at 16; a broken, schizophrenic husband; children to be brought up on nothing much – and in her later, well-deserved prosperity. In her own life and thought, she had a strong Christian recognition of the existence of evil, but a stronger one of good. She had a great love of civilisation, sharpened by the knowledge that it was precarious. In the light of her faith, she understood that a society which lives for the present alone will despise the past and ignore the future. More and more of its citizens will not have children and therefore it will decline.

Many point to the prophetic nature of Pope Paul VI’s comments in Humanae Vitae. The predictions of disaster from birth control and abortion are even more devastating than he suggested. We will get older, live longer and there will be no one to look after us because we aborted and contracted them.

In Japan things are the worst with 21% of the population over 65. Not only are the younger generation of Japanese not making babies, they’re not making love. This article from last year in the UK’s Guardian discusses the problem. (the discussion is pretty frank, so if you’re sensitive you might want to take my word for it) The lesson is clear: when sex is separated from babies its not long until sex becomes irrelevant. After all, there’s only so much one can do with those organs and only so many experiences one might have…

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