Vatican City, Nov 24, 2023 / 11:00 am (CNA).
Pope Francis said Friday one of the ways to address population decline is to make cities more sustainable, increasing the quality of life for those who live there.
“Adopting appropriate criteria for sustainability is an important act of justice and charity, because it aims to meet needs without compromising the safety and survival of those around us and those who will come after us,” he said during a meeting in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace Nov. 24.
He noted that the condition in many cities has become “unlivable” due to pollution, chaos, isolation, marginalization, and loneliness.
Addressing these problems, the pope added, “means putting the person back at the center of the city: This is the way forward. It is the way that will be able to help also address the crises of depopulation and population decline by offering the opportunity to live in environments rich in all that the ancestors left behind, enhanced and embellished by a wise management for the community.”
Pope Francis met with representatives, many of them town mayors, from central Italy, which was devastated by a series of powerful earthquakes between August 2016 and January 2017.
He praised those present for their reconstruction efforts, especially the attention to climate change, sustainability, and respect for nature.
Pope Francis will speak on the climate and related issues at the COP28 climate change conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he will travel Dec. 1–3. It will be Francis’ first time attending and addressing part of the 13-day conference.
Climate issues and the environment have been a priority of Pope Francis’ pontificate.
In October, he released his second major document on the topic, the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum (“Praise God”), in which he warned of “grave consequences” if humanity continues to ignore the threat of climate change.
In his speech on Friday, Francis quoted from Laudate Deum, saying “there is no doubt that the impact of climate change will increasingly harm the lives of many people and families. We will feel the effects in terms of health, jobs, access to resources, housing, forced migration, and in other areas.”
This is why, he added, it is important to implement the necessary measures to slow or stop climate change and to provide methods for coping with the changes that have already taken place.
“Here, too, it is a matter of an open gaze, attentive to others and those who will come after us; we should not be discouraged by criticism or discontented people,” he said.
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As one who devoted a long career to the issues of urban/regional pathologies and planning, I took note of “Our Common Future” (sounds like Our Common Home) when back in 1987 the Brundtland Commission issued its manifesto on “sustainability.” The mix of demographic trajectories and embedded moral questions…
I was encouraged, then, by St. John Paul II who in 1991 began to scope out this big picture for our current century, in Centesimus Annus, where he included the following remark in his treatment of the “human ecology” and “social ecology” (and much else):
“[Man] must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed. In this context, mention should be made of the serious problems of modern urbanization [!], of the need for urban planning [!] which is concerned with how people are to live, and of the attention which should be given to a “social ecology” of work. Man receives from God his essential dignity and with it the capacity to transcend every social order so as to move toward truth and goodness [….] To destroy such structures [“of sin”] and replace them with more authentic forms of living in community is a task which demands courage and patience” (n. 38).
A complicated conundrum, with measurable statistics subordinate to the moral virtues, e.g., “courage and patience”…as in the interrelated but distinct “human ecology” and “natural ecology” (now “integral ecology”?).
But, by throwing everything into the same kitchen blender—even moral theology mixed with morally ambivalent “sociology”—is such a blended “synodality,” or any administered roundtable consensus, really a convincing, effective—and authentic (!)—path forward for, you know, fixing whatever is broken as in our cities, or wherever?
Really fixing things at the personal and family core, or at the urban scale, or even at the global scale, e.g., the Brundtland Commission or Laudato Si?
It’s almost as if some “backwardists” ought not to be so excluded…
The effective method of addressing population decline is to stop using contraception and stop extramarital sex.
We will not be able to maintain quality of life without having enough people to collect and transform natural and recycled resources into the goods that keep us alive. Small improvements in efficiency will be wildly insufficient.
More to the point, we cannot have a quality *spiritual* life if we are committing mortal sin.
Well, I find myself agreeing with Amanda above.
Strange that contraception is virtually never mentioned.
I’m always so glad to hear someone prominent bring up the idea of making cities more livable, I believe it is truly a key to recovery. I was an elected official for 20 yrs, and also separately had a life in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan for years; I’ve seen the evidence as to how cities work/don’t work. I first started on a soapbox about that in about 1977, seeing young people leaving Metro NYC, buying forestland with their trust money and making a mess because they had no clue where they were and how to live there. It would have been far better if they could have felt comfortable, and be productive, in the environment they knew how to function in. And the next realization was “what if they all try to come out of the City and try this?”