Attn. Fox News, et al.: The pope has condemned population control.

ox News is report­ing it. The UK Inde­pen­dent is report­ing it. Life Site News is report­ing it. It’s all over the place. It’s also non­sense. Once again, we have a person—in this case, a pan­elist at the Vatican—claiming that the pope has said some­thing, but no actu­al doc­u­men­ta­tion of those sup­posed words. The pope, so this pan­elist says (his name is Peter Raven), has urged that par­ents have few­er chil­dren in order to make the world “more sus­tain­able.”

I say: Balder­dash.

And the rea­son I say “balder­dash” is because the pope is actu­al­ly on record con­demn­ing pop­u­la­tion con­trol.

He con­demns it in Lauda­to Si:

Instead of resolv­ing the prob­lems of the poor and think­ing of how the world can be dif­fer­ent, some can only pro­pose a reduc­tion in the birth rate. At times, devel­op­ing coun­tries face forms of inter­na­tion­al pres­sure which make eco­nom­ic assis­tance con­tin­gent on cer­tain poli­cies of ‘repro­duc­tive health.’ Yet ‘while it is true that an unequal dis­tri­b­u­tion of the pop­u­la­tion and of avail­able resources cre­ates obsta­cles to devel­op­ment and a sus­tain­able use of the envi­ron­ment, it must nonethe­less be rec­og­nized that demo­graph­ic growth is ful­ly com­pat­i­ble with an inte­gral and shared devel­op­ment.’ To blame pop­u­la­tion growth instead of extreme and selec­tive con­sumerism on the part of some, is one way of refus­ing to face the issues.

Life Site News itself made note of this. So did the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter.

The pope also con­demned pop­u­la­tion con­trol in his inter­view from Mani­la to Rome. Here is one place:

What I want to say about Paul VI is that it is true that open­ness to life is the con­di­tion of the sacra­ment of mat­ri­mo­ny. A man can­not give the sacra­ment to the woman, and the woman give it to him, if they are not in agree­ment on this point to be open to life. To the point that it can be proven that this or the oth­er did not get mar­ried with this inten­tion of being open to life, the mat­ri­mo­ny is null. It’s a cause of the annul­ment of the mar­riage, no? Open­ness to life, no.

Paul VI stud­ied this, with the com­mis­sion, how to help the many cas­es, many prob­lems. They are impor­tant prob­lems, that are even about love in the fam­i­ly, right? The every­day prob­lems — so many of them.

But there was some­thing more. The refusal of Paul VI was not only to the per­son­al prob­lems, for which he will tell the con­fes­sors to be mer­ci­ful and under­stand the sit­u­a­tion and par­don. Being under­stand­ing and mer­ci­ful, no? But he was watch­ing the uni­ver­sal Neo-Malthu­sian­ism that was in progress. And, how do you call this Neo-Malthu­sian­ism? There is less than one per­cent of birth rate growth in Italy. The same in Spain. That Neo-Malthu­sian­ism that sought to con­trol human­i­ty on the part of the pow­ers.

Here is anoth­er:

I think the num­ber of three chil­dren per fam­i­ly that you men­tioned – it makes me suf­fer- I think it is the num­ber experts say is impor­tant to keep the pop­u­la­tion going. Three per cou­ple. When this decreas­es, the oth­er extreme hap­pens, like what is hap­pen­ing in Italy. I have heard, I do not know if it is true, that in 2024 there will be no mon­ey to pay pen­sion­ers because of the fall in pop­u­la­tion.

And here is a third:

Anoth­er curi­ous thing in rela­tion to this is that for the most poor peo­ple, a child is a trea­sure. It is true that you have to be pru­dent here too, but for them a child is a trea­sure. Some would say ‘God knows how to help me’ and per­haps some of them are not pru­dent, this is true. Respon­si­ble pater­ni­ty, but let us also look at the gen­eros­i­ty of that father and moth­er who see a trea­sure in every child.

And now you’re ask­ing me to believe that the pope is advo­cat­ing the very idea he is on record con­demn­ing? And your source for this is the mere claim that he has said it, from a sec­ond­hand source, and no pri­ma­ry source for these sup­posed words?

I say: Fake news.