ROME — Pope Francis lamented the West’s continued demographic decline, insisting on Friday that fewer children signals a lack of hope in the future.
Countering “outdated” myths of dangerous overpopulation, the pontiff contended that far from being a problem, human beings are the solution to the world’s difficulties.
Without naming names, the pope seemingly referred to characters like Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who penned the 1968 doomsday bestseller The Population Bomb, which sparked hysteria over the future of the world and the earth’s ability to sustain human life.
Among Ehrlich’s predictions that proved spectacularly wrong, he prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (65 million of whom would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
In…
