A Vatican economist is blaming the recession on the world’s lowering birth rates ^[1]:

Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not “believe in the future” and have few or no children.

“The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television’s “Octava Dies.”

He noted the Western world’s population growth rate is at 0% — that is, two children per couple — and this, he said, has led to a profound change in the structure of society.

“Instead of stimulating families and society to again believe in the future and have children […] we have stopped having children and have created a situation, a negative economic context decrease,” Gotti Tedeschi observed. “And decrease means greater austerity.”

“With the decline in births,” he explained, “there are fewer young people that productively enter the working world. And there are many more elderly people that leave the system of production and become a cost for the collective.

People have been saying for years that the Western world cannot continue socially, economically or culturally with our current birthrates. But the reason for our falling birth rates is spiritual, not economic: without belief in a loving God, you are very likely to be self-centered and/or pessimistic about the future, and both of these attitudes will make it less likely that you will have children.

Ultimately, it is a crisis in evangelization: we need to proclaim the Good News to others so that they will joyfully welcome new life into their families. Then it is also likely that our economic fortunes will improve as well.