Cardinal Pell’s babies - quantity or quality

Cardinal Pell has been worrying that more babies are needed because otherwise Western countries may not be reproducing enough to replace themselves.

This may not seem a very spiritual concern when the rest of the world is making sure we will number nine billion people by 2050, seeking more food, water and quality of life that our present six billion mostly do not have.

It would be a great thing for leaders of the Church to take up a great concern of the laity - which is, what happens to all the babies?

The New Testament discouraged pronatalism in cataclysmic times, and there is strong gospel condemnation of anyone who makes little children suffer.

Billions of children throughout the world are having a terrible time. The churches are prominent in helping, and protesting, for children hungry and homeless, killed and mutilated by bombs and landmines, in slave labour and as child soldiers, dying at birth or in their first five years.

Churches are also prominent in ambulance work when children in our own country are abused, rejected, disabled and in need.

The big gap is in trying to prevent so much child suffering in the first place. There is some evidence that many people are getting worse in their care of their children, rather than more loving and competent. No child should be born headed for state care or in danger of developing a personality disorder.

What should cardinals and priests really be preaching about babies?

Let’s have more sermons and clerical campaigns about ensuring that every child’s life can be lived more abundantly. Cut the sermons that seem to regard babies as numbers and products. If that means objecting to baby bonuses and extra child-welfare payments where they encourage people to have children they are not going to care for properly, well, see that as a good.

Promote “sex education” and premarital education that always include at least a page on how to love a baby, and another page debunking myths about babies as desirable possessions for teenagers.

Ensure that everyone at around the age of eight has some experience of a baby and younger children. This is a good age for handling littlies without anxieties - so that the first baby anyone holds is not their own.

While theologians are concerned about the spiritual status of embryos, many other people are asking, “When does a baby become human, doctor?” Teach Catholics - and others - a better understanding of “sin” so that infants are not smacked for being “naughty” because they are irritable or don’t sleep.

The tenderness of Madonna with Child is for emulation, not just to render in plaster statues. Let’s have little picture books illustrated with photographs of “how to hold a baby” so that it can cuddle in, not like some object held through the crotch or grasped like shopping or food for a crocodile.

There are bad child-rearing practices to denounce - such as isolating babies from interaction with others, including using the TV as a babysitter. Outings are a great opportunity for “quality time” together, but babies and small children are often tucked into strollers that adults push from behind, with never a word or smile exchanged. This loneliness is now reaching an extreme in the new phenomenon of Baby Burkas - covering prams with coats or blankets as if the infants were parrots to be put to sleep with darkness and semi-asphyxia. And now scientists are designing robots for childcare.

There are good practices that are being forgotten, like singing lullabies and rocking and cuddling, which many parents do not know when they creep exhausted to sleep clinics. Friendliness to babies and children on outings, so that they can enjoy it together, not with the infant facing the world alone, pushed by a bent and anxious adult who seems unaware of what angel unawares they have in their pram. Talking with littlies, instead of stuffing their mouths shut with potato chips or dummies and hoping that watching TV will teach them language. It doesn’t.

The media is full of articles, often by unpracticed young mums, of the trials of caring for babies and toddlers. These need to be answered with the wisdom of the mothers who have experience in coping.

Cardinal Pell, the economics of unsustainable growth should be understood by clergy and people more in terms of human suffering rather than in fears of market forces which surely humans should be able to manage better.

There are more scriptural texts that promote real lovemaking practices with little children than there are texts commanding multiplying - which we have already done enough of anyway. Sometimes it seems as if pedophilia is, perversely, because people don’t know how to love children.

Until there is more concern about quality, concerns about the quantity of babies will just mean more juvenile suffering all round, which no theology can justify.