Havoc of a damaged mentality

SORRY if I sound like a broken record, but there's this piece of news that I consider to be too interesting to just let pass. What makes it more urgent to me is that I know there's hardly anybody else who will comment on it.

It's again about some recent UN studies that indicate the world is on the way to what may be called as depopulation, a process of vanishing population.

These researches say that by 2050, three out of every four countries in the less developed regions -- and that includes us -- will be at below-replacement level.

In fact, the world population estimate for that year is placed at 8.9 billion, already one billion less than what they forecast for the year 2002.

This truly is a big slap to those who some years ago were screaming about an impending population explosion. They were pressuring everyone to go into population control through all sorts of family planning methods, especially the more effective artificial but immoral ones.

Of course, the more common picture in our country today is still that of many people crowding in some parts of our cities. So these studies may not strike as alarming. In fact, we may even still believe that the problem is overpopulation, not depopulation.

And to certain extent, that is true. There is indeed overpopulation, if we equate the growing number of poor people and others suffering some other forms of human misery with overpopulation.

But that's another problem. That's actually a problem of poverty, of injustice, of neglect and ignorance, of lack of sense of solidarity among peoples, which should be tackled with utmost determination from all. These problems are already complicated, but they will discussed some other time.

The problem I am referring here is that of people not wanting anymore to have babies. This is the problem that is spreading like an epidemic. And yet I am afraid many of us are not yet able to vocalize and express it, and therefore are not yet able to do something about it.

It's basically a problem of attitude, a problem of values. It's a problem of the soul that unavoidably translates into a moral crisis. We are talking here of a damaged mentality fast becoming the prevailing culture of our people.

And this problem is sown, watered and cultivated by a very vicious ideological virus that can go by the names of family planning, reproductive health, safe sex, pro-choice, and other immoral concepts and gimmicks.

It is this virus that corrupts, if not destroys the natural tendency of man to have babies in the most human way. With this virus, man ends up considering having babies as a problem, their generative faculties as some kind of a disease.

Proponents of this harmful ideology use several tricks to do the job. They paint false, if very attractive picture of what is supposed to be practical and commonsensical, of what is supposed to comprise human happiness in this world.

They do this by deftly sowing fear, exploiting the ignorance and weaknesses of people, and projecting an image of goodness all around, mainly based on the material and hedonist vision of happiness.

They can suggest, for example, that religion and the Catholic Church are outdated and irrelevant values these days. They can say that morality, if it has to be considered at all, should only be based on what is practical, rather than on some church doctrine or Christian principle.

In so doing they manage to tamper with the natural and Christian way of human reproduction. They manage to remove the true essence of love from the act of human reproduction.

Thus the act becomes more like a physical act alone, or a biological function, not a moral one where reason and freedom and love should dominate. Reducing the act in that way, they proceed to talk only about techniques. Christian values and moral principles are set aside.

This is where they unavoidably get into the legalization of abortion, it being the most efficient technique to eliminate something unwanted. This, of course, after they have redefined what a person is, when human life would have begun, etc.

Besides, on the conjugal act itself, they sever the intrinsic unitive and procreative dimensions of each act, such that one can just have the unitive without the procreative, as in the case of contraception and sterilization, or the procreative without the unitive, as in the case of artificial insemination.

Thirty-five years ago, in 1968, when Pope Paul VI issued his controversial encyclical, Humanae vitae, he already warned us about the dangers of allowing this ideological virus to influence our lives.

These dangers are already getting too obvious to be ignored. There is now depopulation as well as spreading moral decadence all over the world, weakening of the family, marital infidelities, etc.