An Over-Population Rebuttal

Although, I realize this article is long, it is important for understanding the non-existant over-population problem and the Catholic answer to it.

Take a break, and enjoy the article "Planet Un-Parenthood: The Myths of Overpopulation" by Fr. Frank Pavone.

Open to Life: The Population Myth

If you are new to this series, I recommend starting at the beginning: Open to Life Series: What is Openness to Life?

This Open to Life series would not be complete without a statement (or two) about the so-called “over-population problem”. Let me begin, by saying that there is no over-population problem. This myth/theory has been and still is purported as fact (just like evolution)!

The world today makes more food, more efficiently than it ever has. Better farming practices and machinery have made this possible. We actually make more food per person today than we used to—and we do it on less land. There is no food shortage. The world is large enough to produce food for all people. This is not to say that people do not starve because of lack of food. They certainly do. I am simply saying that the world can and does make enough food for everyone; it is just that some governments sadly withhold food from their citizens and many people waste large amounts of food (that theoretically could have gone to feed others).

As far as destroying/polluting the environment, if every person lived as a good steward of the earth through buying local and in season meat, eggs, and produce; gardening where possible; and using energy efficiently, population would be a non-issue. The fact that people destroy the environment through their selfish practices is the only reason why “pollution” and “nature” come into play while talking about over-population. (See my endnote and read my Back to Nature series for a more on this.)

If you do not believe me, do your own research—but make sure you get the facts not the myths. For the best information on this, watch Demographic Bomb and Demographic Winter. These movies really put everything into perspective for Robert and me. There are trailers on the websites, but you have to purchase the DVDs to see them. To get some statistics without purchasing a movie, this page talks about the issue.

Endnote: Please realize, I am not saying that if you do not garden and you buy strawberries in February you are being selfish. I am merely saying that the practices I mentioned help us to be good stewards of the earth, which we are called by God to do.


Up Next: Open to Life Closing Remarks

For full texts of the documents used, see my Open to Life Series: Introduction

Open to Life: Prophesies in Papal Encyclicals

If you are new to this series, I recommend starting at the beginning: Open to Life Series: What is Openness to Life?


God has naturally ordered all things for reasons that we may not understand, but when we start to interfere with them, evil consequences are automatic. The Church has always known the dangers of not following her teachings. And in 1968 when many people wanted the Church to “change” her teaching on birth control (something impossible for the Church since it does not change any teaching on faith and morals), Pope Paul VI disappointed the masses with his encyclical Humanae Vitae. In it, he prophesied what would happen with the world if it chose artificial methods over God’s plan. All four of his prophesies came true and as chilling as it might seem, many people predicted these same or similar outcomes, because this is the natural order of tampering with God.

In his encyclical, Pope Paul VI wrote:

“Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. [1]Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and [2]a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. [3]Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

“Finally, [4]careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.” (17, emphasis mine)

Will anyone disagree that we have an exponential increase in marital infidelity, a true lowering of all moral standards, disrespect for women and them seen as objects, and governments using birth control to control its people (think China and India)?

The Bishops also draw attention to this in their 2006 letter Married Love and the Gift of Life.

“Many would likely be surprised at how long all Christian churches agreed on this teaching against contraception. It was only in 1930 that some Protestant denominations began to reject this long-held position. Those opposed to this trend predicted an increase in premarital sex, adultery, acceptance of divorce, and abortion. Later, in 1968, Pope Paul VI warned that the use of contraception would allow one spouse to treat the other more like an object than a person, and that in time governments would be tempted to impose laws limiting family size. Pope John Paul II called attention to the close association between contraception and abortion, noting that “the negative values inherent in the ‘contraceptive mentality’ . . . are such that they in fact strengthen this temptation [to abortion] when an unwanted life is conceived” (Evangelium Vitae, 13, emphasis mine).

“These predictions have come true. Today we see a pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases, an enormous rise in cohabitation, one in three children born outside of marriage, and abortion used by many when contraception fails. A failure to respect married love’s power to help create new life has eroded respect for life and for the sanctity of marriage.”

Up Next: Eugenics and Birth Control

For full texts of the documents used, see my Open to Life Series: Introduction

Open to Life: Chesterton and Birth Control

If you are new to this series, I recommend starting at the beginning: Open to Life Series What is Openness to Life?


Because I admire Chesterton and his penchant for always writing Truth, I wanted to share what he had to say about birth control. Chesterton was very much against the idea of birth control. He saw what the outcome of its use would be as did many others (including Pope Paul VI who I will talk about later). In The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton said this about propagandists of birth control:

There are not many things that move me to anything like a personal contempt. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. I do not feel any contempt for a Bolshevist, who is a man driven to the same negative simplification by a revolt against very positive wrongs. But there is one type of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular propagandist of what he or she absurdly describes as Birth-Control.

You may remember a portion of this quote I used to have on my side bar. It comes from an essay entitled “Obstinate Orthodoxy” in his book The Thing: Why I am a Catholic.

If those called free-thinkers are sentimentalists, those called free-lovers are open and obvious sentimentalists. We can always convict such people of sentimentalism by their weakness for euphemism. The phrase they use is always softened and suited for journalistic appeals. They talk of free love when they mean something quite different, better defined as free lust. But being sentimentalists they feel bound to simper and coo over the word "love." They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control. We could smash them to atoms, if we could be as indecent in our language as they are immoral in their conclusions.



Picture Credit:
The American Chesterton Society

From Social Reform versus Birth Control, Chesterton states,

The Birth-Controller does not bother [with high society], for the perfectly simple reason that it is not such people that he wants to control. What he wants to control is the populace, and he practically says so. He always insists that a workman has no right to have so many children, or that a slum is perilous because it is producing so many children. The question he dreads is "Why has not the workman a better wage? Why has not the slum family a better house?" His way of escaping from it is to suggest, not a larger house but a smaller family. The landlord or the employer says in his hearty and handsome fashion: "You really cannot expect me to deprive myself of my money. But I will make a sacrifice; I will deprive myself of your children."

Also from Social Reform versus Birth Control:

The very name of "Birth Control" is a piece of pure humbug. It is one of those blatant euphemisms used in the headlines of the Trust Press. It is like "Tariff Reform." It is like "Free Labour." It is meant to mean nothing, that it may mean anything, and especially some thing totally different from what it says. Everybody believes in birth control, and nearly everybody has exercised some control over the conditions of birth. People do not get married as somnambulists or have children in their sleep. But throughout numberless ages and nations, the normal and real birth control is called self control. If anybody says it cannot possibly work, I say it does. In many classes, in many countries where these quack nostrums are unknown, populations of free men have remained within reasonable limits by sound traditions of thrift and responsibility.

And this prophetic bit (from the same),

The fact is, I think, that I am in revolt against the conditions of industrial capitalism and the advocates of Birth Control are in revolt against the conditions of human life. What their spokesmen can possibly mean by saying that I wage a "class war against mothers" must remain a matter of speculation. If they mean that I do the unpardonable wrong to mothers of thinking they will wish to continue to be mothers, even in a society of greater economic justice and civic equality, then I think they are perfectly right. I doubt whether mothers could escape from motherhood into Socialism. But the advocates of Birth Control seem to want some of them to escape from it into capitalism. They seem to express a sympathy with those who prefer "the right to earn outside the home" or (in other words) the right to be a wage-slave and work under the orders of a total stranger because he happens to be a richer man. By what conceivable contortions of twisted thought this ever came to be considered a freer condition than that of companionship with the man she has herself freely accepted, I never could for the life of me make out. The only sense I can make of it is that the proletarian work, though obviously more senile and subordinate than the parental, is so far safer and more irresponsible because it is not parental. I can easily believe that there are some people who do prefer working in a factory to working in a family; for there are always some people who prefer slavery to freedom, and who especially prefer being governed to governing someone else. But I think their quarrel with motherhood is not like mine, a quarrel with inhuman conditions, but simply a quarrel with life. Given an attempt to escape from the nature of things, I can well believe that it might lead at last to something like "the nursery school for our children staffed by other mothers and single women of expert training."  [emphasis mine]

Up Next: Assisted Reproductive Technologies

For full texts of the documents used, see my Open to Life Series: Introduction

Open to Life: Contraception and Morality

If you are new to this series, I recommend starting at the beginning: Open to Life Series What is Openness to Life?


First off, we must remember natural family planning is not “Catholic birth control”. In NFP: The Complete Approach (6) it states,

Christian marriage is a sacrament in which the spouses are called to be generous to each other and to be generous with God in having children and raising them in the ways of the Lord. Marriage is for family.

Children are gifts from God. Most Christian married couples can assume that much of the time, perhaps even most of the time, God is calling them to be generous and to invite another child to share family life on this earth and to share eternity with Him. The knowledge of systematic NFP is also a gift from God, and couples should use it generously, not selfishly. [emphasis mine]

Keeping this in mind, we can now discuss contraception. Most couples today wonder what type of contraceptive they should use instead of whether they should use it. Contraception has become a part of culture and has been distinguished as the “responsible thing to do”.

However, most people are unaware of contraception’s history. Before 1930, all Christian churches taught that contraception was contrary to God’s design. It was Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood) who lobbied for its use, and the Anglican Church was the first to concede. But it only allowed contraception for married couples with severe difficulties. [I will talk about Margaret Sanger and her mission in a later post.] Because of this, the door opened for all other protestant churches, and within thirty years, almost all denominations accepted and some even promoted birth control.

But in the pamphlet entitled “The Contraception Question”, Christopher West asserts, “In rendering sex sterile, we take the powers of life into our own hands and make ourselves like God.” We are not God and cannot assume to be. Children are not commodities that we can produce when convenient and kill when they are not. [I will talk about science and technologies in later posts.]

Admonitions made by Popes:
Pope John Paul II stated that contraception “is to be judged so profoundly unlawful as never to be, for any reason, justified. To think or to say the contrary is equal to maintaining that in human life, situations may arise in which it is lawful not to recognize God as God” (address, Oct. 10 1983).

Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae said “To use this divine gift destroying, even if only partially, its meaning and its purpose is to contradict the nature both of man and of woman and of their most intimate relationship, and therefore it is to contradict also the plan of God and His will. On the other hand, to make use of the gift of conjugal love while respecting the laws of the generative process means to acknowledge oneself not to be the arbiter of the sources of human life, but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator.”

Pope Pius XI said on December 31, 1930, “Any use whatsoever of matrimony [the marriage act] exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin” (Casti Connubii, 56).


Up Next: Contraception and Society

For full texts of the documents used, see my Open to Life Series: Introduction

Open to Life: What is Openness to Life?

We must start the discussion with first things: Life is better than death. If we understand and agree on that one principle, we will see how everything will stem from that.

Being open to life is not always easy. As the saying goes, “God never said it would be easy; He just said it would be worth it.” Having a marriage that is open to children does not mean that you are open to life unless every marital act is open to life. Using contraceptives in any form, at any time, is morally wrong. However, “God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws” (Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI, 11).

We are all called to “be fertile and multiply” (Genesis 1:28 NAB). The Church calls every family to be generous with regard to children. It is only for grave reasons (that must respect the moral law and be prayerfully considered) that we are allowed to limit children for a certain or indefinite period of time (HV 10).

More and more we seem to have a culture of materialism instead of children. Parents are worried about paying for private schools, cars, and college instead of being generous toward children and letting God take care of the rest. In his book The Well and the Shallows, Chesterton says,

He [the child] is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

Another common misconception of today is the concept of “readiness” for children. When are we ever truly ready? Will we ever have “enough” money or “enough” time? This is another one of those materialistic considerations. When people think they must have $1,000 saved to buy all the latest and greatest gadgets for baby, we know they have “lost the appreciation of primary things”.

Consequently, our society today considers parents with only three children to have a large family and rudely asks, “Are you done?” Turkeys are done, chores are done, but children? God calls us to be open to life so that He may bless us with another child.

Up Next: What is Natural Family Planning?

For full texts of the documents used, see my Open to Life Series: Introduction

Tolerance

Everyone can have his or her own opinions, beliefs, and preferences. God allows this through free will. That does not mean that all opinions, beliefs, or preferences are True. He allows everyone to “take their own journey” to the path of Truth and freedom, but not everyone is following the right path (Christians and non-Christians alike).

The world speaks of tolerance and preaches acceptance of whatever new ideas, views, beliefs, attitudes, or actions come up. They talk about “my choice”, “my decision”, or “my business” – like truth is relative and we need to tolerate and even support bad decisions. We cannot tolerate them and we should not support them. This is just another heresy that is prosperous in the “developed world”.

Tolerance leads to uncontrolled immorality. When people feel “accepted”, they are more likely to start, continue, or even worsen the behavior. We accepted teenagers having sex by passing out condoms at school and now seventy percent of nineteen year-olds¹ have engaged in this behavior. We accepted sex before marriage and now 79% percent of all teenage births are to unmarried women compared to only 13% in 1950². The sad thing is the article where I found this statistic has the secular and distorted view of them. The writer considered it a good trend that the teen birthrate has fallen from 82% in 1950 to 49% today but did not add in the correlation about the unwed mothers. The reason the birthrate has fallen in teens is because very few teens marry today and those that do usually do not have children right away and because contraceptive use and abortion has skyrocketed when compared to 1950 (when the pill had not been created and abortion was still illegal). The whole world is devaluing marriage. People have also accepted homosexuality beginning in the 1970s and now they have even gone so far as to support and protect their right to marry! We now tolerate divorce, which has only lead to frivolous marriage – I will talk more about this in a series this summer.

The world supported and even fought for “birth control” – and I will talk about where that led in my coming series. They also supported and fought for women leaving the home so they could feel free to be a wage slave.

The world thinks that tolerance is progressive. They think we are more civilized now that we tolerate everyone than when the Catholic missionaries went out preaching the good news to evangelize the world. But all this tolerance has only led us down the path to where we are today – a world full of problems. The only way to get back is to stop tolerating immortality. As Chesterton said, "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions."



¹ Facts on American Teens’ Sexual and Reproductive Health
² Teen Pregnancy: Trends and Lessons Learned

How Do You Know Truth is True?

I came across this “test” on the “G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense” TV show with Dale Ahlquist.

1. Truth is consistent – Lies, false philosophies, and errors will eventually show holes. The Truth is reliable and dependable.

2. Truth does not change – Truth does not depend on the year or even the century. Truth is valid at all times. Truth survives fads and fashions.

3. Truth is distinctive – Truth emphasizes what is important, not what is unimportant. Chesterton said, “Art, like morality consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

4. Truth is complete – Anything less than the Truth is a heresy. A heresy is a half-truth, a lie, which is only interested in itself instead of the whole Truth.

5. Truth is good – A lie does no one any good, and is mostly self-destructive. The Truth is always good, even if you cannot see it right away.

So, now you know. There may be other ways to tell if Truth is true, but these will start you out with a basic “test”.

True Freedom

Freedom is fully realized by choosing properly between good and evil.” (Theology of the Body for Beginners, Christopher West, p. 23) Freedom is not doing whatever you feel like without regard for others or even yourself. That is licentiousness. Action can only be called truly free if it remains within moral and logical bounds. Two examples will explain this better: I am free to draw a circle, but I am not free to call it a square. “We are free to do whatever we want with our bodies but we are not free to determine whether or not what we do is good or evil.” (ToB for Beginners, p. 23)

Many people today feel they can do whatever they want. They think because God gave them free will, they are free to live their lives however they choose; there is no right or wrong way to do something. Well, if that were true, then according to Chesterton, Christianity must be false because: “You cannot evade the issue of God … defending [Christianity means] talking about anything or everything. … Nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.” (For the whole quote, see my Intro to Chesterton post.)

Since God gave us free will we have a responsibility, as Christians, to live our lives as examples and to show others what it means to be truly free. When you choose “properly between good and evil”, you are happy. And others will notice that. Hopefully, by your example you will encourage others to live like you.

An Introduction to Chesterton



Artwork courtesy of the
American Chesterton Society

I thought, since I told you my ideas were inspired by the man, it would be important to give some background on Gilbert Keith Chesterton before I proceed.

He was alive from 1874 to 1936 and lived in England. As Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society puts it, “He said something about everything and he said it better than everybody else.”

He wrote one hundred books, contributed to two hundred more, hundreds of poems, five plays, five novels, and around two hundred short stories, including the popular detective stories about Father Brown. Though, as Chesterton proclaims, he was not a writer. He was a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including thirty years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News and thirteen years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.

Chesterton has been called the “Apostle of Common Sense”, because he wrote about, he defended the common man and common sense. He wrote about the Truth. He has also been called a complete thinker, because he didn’t defend half-truths. He defended the whole Truth. Because he wrote about everything, Ahlquist says reading Chesterton is a “complete education” in itself.

Even though he did not actually convert until 1922, Chesterton defended the Catholic Church, Her beliefs, and the Truth throughout his whole life and in everything he wrote. One of the most important things he said was in an article he wrote for the Daily News on December 12, 1903:

You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity be. . . a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over. But if Christianity should happen to be true - then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.

In other words, Truth is not relative. You cannot tolerate another’s position on the basis of “everybody has their own views/opinions”. Since Christianity is true, there is only one Truth and it encompasses the whole world. This Truth is not just bound to “religion” and “religious things”. It covers every aspect of life: how you live, how you take care of your home, how you educate your children, how you care for your family, how you provide for your family, and everything else you can think of!