P.D. James and designer parkas for chihuahuas

P.D. James’ detective novels, featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, are every bit as gripping as those penned by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edith Pargeter (who wrote as “Ellis Peters” when creating the Cadfael Chronicles), and Ann Cleeves.

Yet my favorite work by the woman who was honored with a life peerage and died in 2014 as Baroness James of Holland Park is her dystopian look into a world of global infertility, The Children of Men. Forget the movie claiming to be based on the novel and read the book—the first sentence of which rather gets one’s attention:

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

I won’t spoil the story by going into details of the world without children that P.D. James limns. Suffice it to say that elements of it came to mind last month during two and a half weeks of work in Rome.

Paris may call itself the “City of Light,” but Rome in the run-up to Christmas is just as spectacularly illuminated: from the small streets of the Borgo district to the park surrounding Castel Sant’Angelo to the glamorous shopping area around Via Condotti and the Spanish Steps. Amidst all that light, however, there were shadows: shadows involving the relative childlessness of a country with a birth rate far, far below replacement level. And just as in P.D. James’ novel (in which childlessness is caused by inexplicable, global male infertility), a world without a lot of children leads to bizarre adult behaviors.

Pet stores now seem far more evident in Rome. Take, for example, myfamily, which has created a “pet lifestyle universe” in Rome’s Termini railway station. And what is on offer in myfamily? How about pricey sweaters and parkas for… chihuahuas and other micro-dogs? For myfamily is home to a “pet lifestyle brand,” featuring “meticulously crafted” accessories for dogs and cats, including “over 700 distinctive pet tag designs, customizable with in-store engraving in less than two minutes.”

“Family” has, evidently, acquired new — and some would say, ominous — connotations in a world of infertility. Unlike P.D. James’s fictional dystopia, however, today’s Western crisis of childlessness is not inexplicable. It is entirely explicable by the deliberate decision of young couples not to have children. Childlessness today is self-induced.

Then there were the experiences shared with me by an academic friend on sabbatical in Rome, where he had spent his teenage years. In addition to his research, my friend had used the past several months to catch up with classmates from his old liceo, or Italian classical high school. Like my friend, these were now professionals with families. And what they described as common practices in their upper-middle-class neighborhoods certainly got their old classmate’s attention — and mine, when he repeated the stories to me.

For example: What is the most common First Holy Communion gift? An iPhone.

For example: What is the #1 gift for girls on their 18^th birthday? Plastic surgery.

My friend’s liceo compatriots also spoke of young people withdrawing from human society into a world of pseudo-relationships on the Internet. Of young people terrified by any form of difficulty. Of women unable to find husbands and men confused about what it means to be an adult man. Even more disturbing was the lethargy exhibited by the Roman parish pastor, who had to be cajoled by irate parents into providing a program of pre-Confirmation instructions for the young people who wanted to receive the sacrament.

To be sure, this is anecdotal evidence. And it’s certainly the case that similar phenomena—and worse—can be found around the so-called developed world. For example, I never heard anything in Italy in a league with “Ami-chan,” the AI-powered “electronic granddaughter doll” (read: robot) available in Japan since 2021, which has a 1,600-word vocabulary, sings nursery rhymes, and interacts with elderly Japanese who have no grandchildren of their own.

In the face of these unmistakable signs of cultural, even civilizational, decay, the Church has its work cut out for it. That is why the renaissance of campus ministries in the United States and the tremendous growth of young adult ministries like the Thomistic Institute, the Leonine Forum, and FOCUS are signs of hope. These initiatives provide models that the Church in the United States can share with the Church in Europe, Latin America, the ANZAC countries, and East Asia.

Before it’s too late.

(George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)