Ceaseless news of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, inundations of reporting on bloodshed in Ukraine, dialogues of the deaf over climate change, the unstoppable unfurling of AI, feed a spirit of defeat about continued human existence.  

Compounding all that, the truly dark news is that our survival is menaced by an insidious event that goes almost unmentioned because its progress literally occurs invisibly. Paradoxically, it is also the crack where the light gets in, i.e., in the authentic illumination of the Holy Spirit through our Holy Mother the Church.

Fifty-seven years ago this summer, on July 29, 1968, Pope Paul VI promulgated the encyclical Humane Vitae upholding the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life and procreation as the God-ordained end of indissoluble marriage. It sparked spontaneous debate and was subjected to ferocious blasts of global hostility, secular, religious, and even from laity and clergy within the Church herself. 

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Yet a book published this July shows why those very critics should have listened to Mother. 

The work of two economists from the University of Texas, “After the Spike: Population, Progress and the Case for People” spells out the truth that human life, the more the merrier, is intrinsically good in and of itself.

While in no way explicitly Catholic, the book by demographic specialists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso validates with hard data the premise of Humane Vitae that what we call the “contraceptive mentality” fosters the solipsism that reduces other human beings to mere instruments of self-gratification. 

Within a marital context, Pope Paul VI warned, “It is to be feared that husbands who become accustomed to contraception will lose respect for their wives... and no longer care for their physical and psychological equilibrium; they will come to the point of considering them as mere instruments of selfish enjoyment.”

As contemporary economists, Spears and Geruso extend that same prophetic voice against the perpetuation of the long-debunked Malthusian myth that increased population inevitably portends the death of humanity, and that the only safeguard is radical reduction of reproduction.

In reviewing “After the Spike,” Wall Street Journal writer Greg Ip frames the “invisible” threat of this out-moded thinking explicitly.

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“If humanity’s existence were threatened by plague, nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, people would surely demand action. But what if the threat came from our own, passive acceptance of decline? This is not some theoretical curiosity: It is a reasonable extrapolation of globally declining fertility rates,” Ip writes.

He adds this coda: “People aren’t demanding action. In fact, some think a smaller population is actually a good thing.”

They remain, in other words, within the gravitational pull of Paul Ehrlich’s border-line fraudulent “The Population Bomb,” which appeared like a death star the same year as Humane Vitae. Ehrlich, whose work was widely taught as virtual gospel truth to generations of high school students, preached that human beings were the source of humanity’s problems and, ipso facto, fewer humans would lead to fewer problems socially, politically, and environmentally. Contra the Church’s teaching against contraception, Ehrlich predicted mass starvation from agricultural collapse if population growth wasn’t negated. 

In the almost sixty years since, the exact opposite has proved to be true. The population collapse we are now silently experiencing (two thirds of the world’s population lives in countries that are below the stable replacement rate) is turning out to be catastrophic. Fewer people mean fewer hands to drive forward innovation, reform, progress. 

“Spears and Geruso show how humans, through ingenuity and behavioral change, have reduced pollution and expanded available resources as their numbers grew,” Ip writes. “In 2013, China’s smog was among the world’s worst. Over the next decade its population grew by 50 million, but particulate air pollution fell by half. As India’s population has grown, so has the average height of its children thanks to better nutrition and sanitation.”

The two economists are also frank about the failure to pull out of our population nosedive toward a potential extinction event: “(Global population) will not fall to 6 billion or 4 billion or 2 billion and hold there…Humanity could hasten its own extinction if birth rates stay too low for a long time,” Ip quotes.

The words assert on the economic side the equivalent moral imperative set out by Paul VI in Humane Vitae: ““Each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.”

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Each and every. Of necessity. Intrinsic relationship. Procreation of human life.

Mother knew. Mother knows.