The Message of the Italian Bishops for the 37th National Day for Life: "Initiating a new Humanism with the Fantasy of Love"
"What world we will leave to the children, but also what children will we leave in the world'". This is the question asked by the Italian Bishops in their message for the 37th World Day for Life, which will be celebrated on February 1st, with the slogan: "United for Life." "When a family opens up to receive a new child, it experiences in the flesh of his own offspring ‘the revolutionary force of tenderness‘ and a new light shines in that home, not only for the family but for the entire society," the bishops added, speaking then of the "eclipse of that light", at least judging by the "alarming demographic decline we are experiencing." The falling birth rate, they continue, "will have a devastating effect on the future" and the children born today "less and less, will find themselves at the tip of an inverted social pyramid that places on them the crushing burden of previous generations."
The message then addresses "the sad phenomenon of abortion", which according to the Bishops, "is one of the causes of this situation," since it stops "yearly over a hundred thousand human beings from seeing the light and making a valuable contribution to Italy. It should also not be forgotten that the practice of artificial insemination, while pursuing the right of having a child at all costs, involves in its method a considerable loss of fertilized eggs—i.e., of human beings who shall never be born. To keep the desire for children from "turning into an alleged" need "hearts also need to be opened to children who already born and have been abandoned: it means—so the Bishops write—facilitating pathways of adoption and foster care, which are still excessively difficult because of the costs, bureaucracy, and sometimes not without bitter loneliness." Solidarity with life, according to the Bishops, "can also be opened in new and creative ways of generosity, through the adoption of one family by another," for example "by means of a closeness that an expecting mother can find in a family, or a group of families, who care for her and the unborn child, thus avoiding the risk of abortion to which, even against her will, she is oriented." The "fantasy of love" can—conclude the Bishops—"get us out of this impasse, by initiating a new humanism" the construction of which is "the real challenge we face, and that starts from the ‘yes‘ to life."