Jimmy Akin dispels a rumor which claims that Pope Francis wants people to have fewer children, noting that this rumor arose from one person’s private conversation with the Holy Father.
Transcript:
Host: We’ll go to real quick to Paul in Columbus, Ohio listening on 820 AM St. Gabriel radio. Paul, if you could state your question relatively quickly, then Jimmy can get an answer in for you in all likelihood.
Caller: Yeah, I was told by a Protestant friend that the Pope recently said that he wants people to have fewer children in order to lessen the damage being done by the planet. If you could comment on that?
Jimmy: Yeah, I saw this story too, and I immediately read it because I knew I’d likely get questions about it.
From what I can tell, the Pope has made no such statement in public. And this claim was made by an individual who is a scientist and who is an environmentalist, and he is connected with the Holy See in that he, you know, functions on one of the lay commissions that is affiliated with the Holy See, but it–and in fact, it’s the Pontifical Academy of Sciences–but you don’t even have to be a Catholic to be a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, it’s just a general organization that the Church uses to express its interest in the sciences.
And so you’ve had people who are atheists who are members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. And they don’t all share Catholic values on things, and this is apparently based on private oral conversations at most, and it’s very easy for people who who have a particular viewpoint to interpret private conversations in the way that they want those remarks to be interpreted. I mean, he might have come up to the Pope, for example, and said, “Oh, there’s this huge problem with overpopulation,” and the Pope said, “Oh it’s a serious concern.” And then he infers from that the Pope has just said we need to have fewer children. Well that’s not what the Pope said. In the scenario I just painted, he just said overpopulation is a concern. And that’s a very different thing than saying “People everywhere should have fewer children.”
So after looking into this story, I concluded that there’s really no reason to be concerned about this; it seemed like the press was overly inflating something to try to make a dramatic narrative out of it. But if Pope Francis has such views, he can say them for himself in public, and we don’t need to be paying attention to the papal rumor net. That’s something I’ve said all the way back since the reign of John Paul II when I first became a Catholic apologist. There are always all kinds of rumors about “Did you hear the Pope said this in private?” You know, and half the time or more they end up being false.