A father and son observe pro-natalist billboard campaign in Madrid, Spain. / Credit: Large Families Association of Madrid
ACI Prensa Staff, Feb 23, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).
The Large Families Association of Madrid in Spain has launched an advertising campaign featuring the message “Save the planet, have more children.”
The campaign’s objective is to “turn on its head the prevailing pessimism and invite more people to experience the joy that comes with a large family.”
On billboards and in publicity throughout metropolitan Madrid, the campaign also directly challenges people to consider that “a world without pollution is not worth it if there are no people to enjoy it.”
The association said in a statement that the campaign aims to “challenge passersby to ask themselves what reasons may be leading them to close themselves off from the possibility of expanding their family.”
The campaign tries to make people reflect upon such common attitudes as “Kids? I already have a dog,” “One is enough,” and “Two, but not one more!”
The ads include a QR code that invites readers to watch and share a video that exposes the programs of international institutions that are pressuring governments to enact neo-Malthusian policies to reduce the world population.
This agenda has resulted in a growing reduction in aid to large families. The narrator of the campaign’s video observes: “They tell us that we have to reduce the population… and that’s why they’ll help us with abortion, ideologies, or eliminating aid to large families.”
In addition, the video narration refers to issues such as the manipulation of language, such as: “They call it reproductive health care” or the threat posed by growing depopulation in rural areas by noting: “Do you know where there is room left? In the parks, which are empty, or in the schools, which are closing more and more classrooms.”
The video concludes by pointing out: “They say they have calculated how much each child pollutes… and they have forgotten that a world without pollution is not worth it if there are no people to enjoy it.”
The Large Families Association’s ad campaign is reminiscent of a similar one that ran in New York’s Times Square in January by EveryLife, the leading pro-life diaper company in the U.S., which featured a post by X owner Elon Musk that read: “Having children is saving the world.”
Coinciding with the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January, below the Musk quote the billboard touted: “Make more babies.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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CNA Newsroom, Dec 21, 2022 / 15:40 pm (CNA).
Pope Francis’ 2021 Angelus message for Advent is worth recalling in the closing days before Christmas this year.The pontiff proposed to the faithful five concr… […]
Pope Benedict XVI arrives in St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican for the Oct. 21, 2012, canonization ceremony for Jacques Berthieu, Pedro Calungsod, Giovanni Battista Piamarta, Maria Carmen Salles y Barangueras, Marianne Cope, Caterina (Kateri) Tekakwitha, and Anna Schaffer. / Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 2, 2023 / 14:00 pm (CNA).
During his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI beatified 870 people and canonized a total of 45 saints. Though his papacy was relatively short, spanning from 2005 to 2013, the 45 people whom he declared saints are models of faith and holiness, celebrated by Catholics all over the world.
Here are seven of the best-known saints Pope Benedict XVI canonized:
St. Kateri Tekakwitha
St. Kateri Tekakwitha, or “Lily of the Mohawks,” was the first Native American saint to be canonized. Born in what is today New York state, she was the daughter of a Mohawk father and a Christian Algonquin mother. She was baptized at age 21 and fled persecution to St. Francis Xavier Mission near Montreal, Canada, joining a community of Native American women who had also converted to Christianity. She is remembered for her suffering, devout faith, courage, and her purity. St. Kateri died on April 17, 1680, at age 24.
Statue of St. Kateri Tekakwitha with lily. Shutterstock
She was canonized by Benedict XVI on Oct. 21, 2012. He said: “Kateri impresses us by the action of grace in her life despite the absence of external help and by the courage of her vocation, so unusual in her culture. In her, faith and culture enrich each other! May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are.”
St. Hildegard of Bingen
St. Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess, artist, author, composer, mystic, pharmacist, poet, preacher, and theologian from Germany. Born in 1098, in her late teens she became a Benedictine nun at the Monastery of Saint Disibodenberg. From the age of 3, she experienced visions of God and was asked by her confessor to write them down in what became the influential illustrated book “Scivias.”She founded two monasteries and was a prolific writer of poetry, theology, and sacred music. She died on Sept. 17, 1179.
A sculpture of Hildegard of Bingen by Karlheinz Oswald at Eibingen Abbey in Hesse, Germany. . Gerda Arendt (CC BY-SA 3.0).
St. Hildegard was canonized on May 10, 2012, and declared a Doctor of the Church by Benedict XVI on Oct. 7, 2012. He said: “In Hildegard are expressed the most noble values of womanhood: hence the presence of women in the Church and in society is also illumined by her presence, both from the perspective of scientific research and that of pastoral activity.”
St. Damien of Molokai
The bronze cast of Marisol Escobar’s ‘Father Damien’ in the National Statuary Hall (detail). public domain.
Joseph de Veuster, later to become St. Damien of Molokai, was born in 1840 in rural Belgium. At the age of 13, he was forced to leave school to work on a farm but later decided to pursue a religious vocation with the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. As a priest, he served victims of leprosy quarantined on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. He eventually contracted the disease, losing his eyesight, speech, and mobility. St. Damien died of leprosy on April 15, 1889. Benedict XVI said of St. Damien, whom he canonized on Oct. 11, 2009: “Following in St. Paul’s footsteps, St. Damien prompts us to choose the good warfare, not the kind that brings division, but the kind that gathers people together. He invites us to open our eyes to the forms of leprosy that disfigure the humanity of our brethren and still today call for the charity of our presence as servants, beyond that of our generosity.”
St. Marianne Cope
St. Marianne Cope was born in Germany in 1838 and entered religious life with the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis in Syracuse, New York, in 1862. Mother Marianne served as an educator and opened two of central New York’s first hospitals. She was sent to Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai in Hawaii at age 45 to care for leprosy patients and established an education and health care system for them in the years she was there.
Painting of nun Saint Marianne Cope and images with lepers and her team on Molokai Island at Mary, Star of the Sea, Catholic Church, Kalapana, Hawaii. Claudine Van Massenhove / Shutterstock
Benedict XVI canonized St. Marianne Cope on Oct. 21, 2012. Of her legacy, he said: “At a time when little could be done for those suffering from this terrible disease, Marianne Cope showed the highest love, courage, and enthusiasm. She is a shining and energetic example of the best of the tradition of Catholic nursing sisters and of the spirit of her beloved St. Francis.”
St. Jeanne Jugan
St. Jeanne Jugan was born on Oct. 25, 1792, during the French Revolution. At age 25, she joined the Third Order of St. John Eudes, a religious association for laypersons. After some time serving as a nurse caring for elderly women, she acquired an unused convent building that would hold 40 people and established the Little Sisters of the Poor. At the time of her death on Aug. 29, 1879, 2,400 members were serving internationally.
Portrait of St. Jeanne Jugan (1792–1879), foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor, by Léon Brune 1855. Public domain
At St. Jeanne Jugan’s canonization on Oct. 11, 2009, Benedict said: “Jeanne lived the mystery of love, peacefully accepting obscurity and self-emptying until her death. Her charism is ever timely while so many elderly people are suffering from numerous forms of poverty and solitude and are sometimes also abandoned by their families.”
St. Pedro Calungsod
St. Pedro Calungsod was born in 1654 in the Philippines. In 1668, at the age of 14, he was among the young catechists chosen to accompany Spanish Jesuit missionaries — among them Blessed Diego Luis de San Vitores — to the Marianas Islands to spread the Catholic faith. St. Pedro was responsible for converting many people, especially through the sacrament of baptism. On April 2, 1672, he was killed, along with San Vitores, while they were conducting a baptism. He is now recognized as a martyr.
Pope Francis and Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle before a mosaic of catechist St. Pedro Calungsod in St. Peter’s Basilica on Nov. 21, 2013. Credit: Kerri Lenartowick/CNA.
He was canonized on Oct. 21, 2012. Of St. Pedro’s hardships, while visiting the Marianas Islands, Benedict said: “Pedro, however, displayed deep faith and charity and continued to catechize his many converts, giving witness to Christ by a life of purity and dedication to the Gospel. Uppermost was his desire to win souls for Christ, and this made him resolute in accepting martyrdom.”
St. Alphonsa
St. Alphonsa was born in Kerala, India, on Aug. 19, 1910. As a young woman, she rejected all suitors who came her way, as she was determined to enter religious life. In 1923, she suffered an accident that left her burned, disabled, and partially disfigured. She joined the Franciscan Clarist Congregation, and until her death suffered from physical ailments and problems associated with her disability. In her love for God, she embraced her sufferings until her death on July 28, 1946.
1996 stamp of India with photo of St. Alphonsa. India Post, Government of India via Wikimedia Commons
St. Alphonsa was canonized by Benedict XVI on Oct. 12, 2008. She is the first Indian woman to become a saint. In a Vatican statement released on the day of her canonization, she is described as “a victim for the love of the Lord, happy until the final moment and with a smile of innocence always on her lips.”
St. Monica. / Credit: Luis Tristán, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
CNA Staff, Aug 27, 2024 / 04:00 am (CNA).
On Aug. 27, one day before the feast of her son St. Augustine, the Catholic Church honors St. Monica, whose holy example and ferv… […]
1 Comment
Yours truly remembers when the academic Barry Commoner first introduced the notion of “sustainability” (book: “The Closing Circle,” 1971). He argued that the ecological problem was not in human numbers but much more in the Technocracy attached to these numbers. So, with this multiplier in mind, he argued against Paul Ehrlich and his “The Population Bomb.” Also, against the likelihood that draconian measures would be imposed most likely on the poor outside of the halls of power.
So, there’s a new conundrum within a fallen world.
And, a crucial distinction to be made between demographics and the regnant Technocratic paradigm being marketed to all. That in order to go around the block to buy a quart of milk we strap on a 3,000-pound prosthesis fueled by imported oil! Or, some opposite examples, however, are how internet towers have replaced miles of copper wiring, and entire libraries have been miniaturized into a computer chip, and how zoom videoconferencing can replace a whole bunch of troposphere air-miles by CEOs meeting to divvy-up global market share (and even to militate as with one voice for, say, the oxymoron of “gay marriage” in 2015).
Somewhere in the mix is the reality and “transcendent dignity of the human person,” as unpacked into the Catholic Social Teaching (CST)…
Which includes responsible parenthood as the right and responsibility of parents (binary!) to make prudent decisions within moral means—that is, without resorting to Technocracy’s anti-conceptive pill culture, or the backstop Abortion Industry’s retooled Aztec rites (rights?), or now mail-order abortion tablets (Auschwitz miniaturized into a home medicine cabinet).
While somewhat of a leftist himself, Commoner nevertheless rejected the simplistic Malthusian paradigm together with inevitable Statist “solutions.” But he also coined four rules of natural ecology: Everything is connected to everything else (glossy car paints are based on mica mined in India by child slave labor); everything must go somewhere (industrial hazardous waste dumped half way around the globe), nature knows best (or sometimes kicks back as with the Dust Bowl), and there’s no such thing as a free lunch (not even from a paper-money culture that simply kicks the price tag down the road into our children’s future).
No falsely sweeping answers proposed here…from the CST, solidarity and subsidiarity remain inseparable.
It might just be that the future is for real families, while everyone else chemically or deliberately sterilizes themselves into non-existence. In any event, does the illuminating neologism “integral ecology” (Laudato Si) also tend to mask the irreducible distinction between the “natural ecology” and, yes, the interrelated “human ecology” of families and such?
The riddle of Modernity: the irreducible difference between the external and many “Laws of Nature” and the internal and universal “Natural Law.”
Yours truly remembers when the academic Barry Commoner first introduced the notion of “sustainability” (book: “The Closing Circle,” 1971). He argued that the ecological problem was not in human numbers but much more in the Technocracy attached to these numbers. So, with this multiplier in mind, he argued against Paul Ehrlich and his “The Population Bomb.” Also, against the likelihood that draconian measures would be imposed most likely on the poor outside of the halls of power.
So, there’s a new conundrum within a fallen world.
And, a crucial distinction to be made between demographics and the regnant Technocratic paradigm being marketed to all. That in order to go around the block to buy a quart of milk we strap on a 3,000-pound prosthesis fueled by imported oil! Or, some opposite examples, however, are how internet towers have replaced miles of copper wiring, and entire libraries have been miniaturized into a computer chip, and how zoom videoconferencing can replace a whole bunch of troposphere air-miles by CEOs meeting to divvy-up global market share (and even to militate as with one voice for, say, the oxymoron of “gay marriage” in 2015).
Somewhere in the mix is the reality and “transcendent dignity of the human person,” as unpacked into the Catholic Social Teaching (CST)…
Which includes responsible parenthood as the right and responsibility of parents (binary!) to make prudent decisions within moral means—that is, without resorting to Technocracy’s anti-conceptive pill culture, or the backstop Abortion Industry’s retooled Aztec rites (rights?), or now mail-order abortion tablets (Auschwitz miniaturized into a home medicine cabinet).
While somewhat of a leftist himself, Commoner nevertheless rejected the simplistic Malthusian paradigm together with inevitable Statist “solutions.” But he also coined four rules of natural ecology: Everything is connected to everything else (glossy car paints are based on mica mined in India by child slave labor); everything must go somewhere (industrial hazardous waste dumped half way around the globe), nature knows best (or sometimes kicks back as with the Dust Bowl), and there’s no such thing as a free lunch (not even from a paper-money culture that simply kicks the price tag down the road into our children’s future).
No falsely sweeping answers proposed here…from the CST, solidarity and subsidiarity remain inseparable.
It might just be that the future is for real families, while everyone else chemically or deliberately sterilizes themselves into non-existence. In any event, does the illuminating neologism “integral ecology” (Laudato Si) also tend to mask the irreducible distinction between the “natural ecology” and, yes, the interrelated “human ecology” of families and such?
The riddle of Modernity: the irreducible difference between the external and many “Laws of Nature” and the internal and universal “Natural Law.”