Old people and no children: Pope warns against Europe becoming ‘the old continent’

On May 25, Pope Leo XIV addressed members of the European Parliament’s Intergroup on Demography at the Vatican with a warning that they risk becoming “the old continent”—not because of its ancient history, but because of its advancing age. Declining birthrates and population aging, according to the Holy Father, are “an urgent challenge with practical implications for millions of people and their families.”

The Holy Father delivered these remarks on the same day as the release of the much-awaited encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, focused on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. As those in the clerical and political realms have correctly claimed, Europe’s patent demographic collapse is not just an economic issue but a civilisational and spiritual one. A society that loses confidence in the value of human life eventually loses confidence in creating new life at all. It should go without saying that without new life, our civilisation will cease to exist.

This is a civilisational crisis that should frankly scare policymakers into action. But no prior or existing solutions proposed or enacted have been successful. They have also not been radical enough. In Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán enacted a variety of economic incentives and committed 5 per cent of the country’s GDP to improving birth-rates; the results were marginal except for a detectable increase in marriages. In France, Prime Minister Macron’s attempt to raise the pension age was a political disaster. Across Europe, fertility rates remain well below replacement level. Nations that once overflowed with children are depending increasingly on mass immigration and often dehumanising automation to sustain aging populations. This is not an enduring or desirable social compact.

Modern culture deserves a fair amount of blame for this crisis. Those with influence in media, politics, and academia increasingly frame marriage and children not as blessings, but as constraints on personal freedom. Praising inordinate focus on the self, our culture caricatures family life as backward and burdensome. The Holy Father criticised the “contradictory claims of purportedly family-friendly policies, which simultaneously promote discrimination against motherhood, exalt abortion as a right, and undermine the very foundation of the desire to start a family.”

This contradiction lies at the heart of the West’s demographic unravelling. Governments piously lament declining births while maintaining economic and cultural conditions that make family formation feel impossible. No doubt – the government cannot fix everything. The state cannot command behaviours into existence. But it can create an environment of facilitation rather than control for the goods that it wants to incentivise. This is the proper role of government here, and the urgency of concerted and sustained government action cannot be overstated. Europeans must go to war against the demographic crisis, through a radical reorientation of economic and cultural policies.

A healthy society creates conditions where marriage and family become realistic, stable, and attractive possibilities from both a cultural and financial perspective. Young adults need confidence that they can afford housing and rely on stable employment and wages capable of supporting children. Natal care should not be commodified, nor treated as a luxury product. In Israel, the only developed nation maintaining above-replacement fertility, natal care is entirely state-subsidised from pregnancy to after birth care, and commonplace fertility treatments are provided free of charge by the state and entirely divorced from profit incentives. If the state can insist it must provide welfare and benefits to millions of illegal immigrants, can it not at least acknowledge its role in providing the native population’s most fundamental need – to recreate itself?

The young generation’s anxieties delaying marriage and childbirth are based on more than a lack of faith, though this is a significant and undeniable problem. Rising housing costs, inflation instability, economic precarity, collapsing social trust, and political fragmentation are all profoundly “top-down” realities. A twenty-five-year-old couple postponing marriage and children because they cannot afford an apartment is a rational response to an environment that has become hostile to permanence.

For decades, the prevailing mentality has been that economic growth is detached from family formation; in this mindset, citizens became interchangeable units of production and consumption. The neglect of citizens as inherited communities carried forward by living generations has revealed itself in a desperately disenchanted society. The irony is that modern Europe possesses almost peerless wealth and technological sophistication while simultaneously struggling to sustain the most basic human continuity. The bastion of the greatest civilisation man has ever produced can no longer persuade its own young people that the future is worth inhabiting with children.

There are many reasons Europe and the West find itself in our present-day crisis. Active Leftist and Revolutionary cultural forces have strategically worked to detach individuals from family bonds, communal obligations, and transcendent meaning. But we must believe that if state policies, cultural influences and intellectual trends weakened marriage and family life, then the same things can be the keys to restoring them.

More than anything, Europe needs its policymakers to take radical steps for a culture of abundant marriage and family: where couples can stably provide for expectant families, motherhood is protected, and having children is not an unbearable financial burden. History offers many examples of civilisations collapsing through invasion or conquest. Far rarer, and perhaps more tragic, are civilisations that simply stop believing enough in themselves to maintain the will to live for future generations.