Pope Francis urges Italy to have babies, accept migrants

Pope Francis went off-script on Sunday during a speech in southern Italy, urging Italians to start reproducing again and the country to open its heart to migrants.

He was responding, not for the first time, to the fact that Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe.

After giving outdoor Mass in Matera, Italy, the pontiff spoke off the cuff, The Associated Press reported, entreating Italians to up their procreation quotient.

“I’d like to ask Italy: More births, more children,” Francis said.

Earlier this year he decried the country’s “demographic winter.”

Italy is at its lowest birthrate since its unification in 1861, and recorded just 404,000 live births in 2020. This put the deficit between births and deaths at 342,000, the biggest gap since the Spanish Flu in 1918. It’s a gap about the size of the population of Florence.

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“An Italy without children is an Italy that doesn’t have a place in the future,” Premier Mario Draghi said at the time. “An Italy that is slowly ceasing to exist.”

The far-right leader Giorgia Meloni, who on Sunday appeared to have won the vote to replace him, campaigned on a “God, family and homeland” mantra.

Francis said last year that government policies should be created to provide financial stability to families to entice them to stay in Italy and bear families.

In Sunday’s speech, he said Italy should also embrace migrants, noting that it was the Catholic Church’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees. He said “God’s plan” is for migrants and human-trafficking victims to live in peace and dignity, in a more “inclusive and fraternal future.”

Meloni, too, has called for financial incentives to families, but she is known for her antipathy to immigrants.

The U.S. is in similar straights vis a vis births, with a study in January 2019 showing that Americans weren’t reproducing fast enough to replenish the aging population. An increase recorded in May 2022 was still lower than pre-pandemic levels.

With News Wire Services