DON VINCENZO writes:

Much to my surprise, the extent of the continuing decline of the traditional, nuclear family has now become a fact of life in a place that I thought it would not happen as quickly: Italy. In an article in the Italian national newspaper, Corriere della Sera (July 10, 2013), the Italian government reported that the number of children born to non-married couples has increased steadily. As a national average, from 8.1 percent in 1995, 20.4 percent in 2009, it now has reached 24.5 percent in 2011.

The north led the way with the area of the Alto Adige reaching nearly 42 percent, and the lowest in the southern region of Basilicata at 10.3 percent.

If demography is destiny, then the future of the Western world will invariably suffer the consequences of this unprecedented trend in family life. If marriage, and all that it implies, is deemed superfluous to the health of the state, then it cannot survive as healthy, for without the family structure, the vital center of any country cannot hold.

In his riveting novel, The Camp of the Saints, which described and foretold the Third World invasion of France, the novelist Jean Raspail wrote: “When freedom expands to mean freedom of instinct and social destruction, then freedom is dead.” We might also add the death of Western civilization.

The decline and distortion of the institution of marriage, and its devastating impact on the traditional nuclear family and child rearing demonstrate once more, if that is necessary, that, to use the oft-repeated phrase of Lawrence Auster, we, along with the nations of Western Europe, are well along the path to national suicide.

Laura writes:

How is that one of the most convivial, family-oriented cultures in history now has a disastrously low birthrate? At 1.4 children per woman, Italy’s birthrate is well below replacement level. I am sure it is lower for native Italians, among whom the one-child family has been common for many years now.

I think we can find the explanation in the Italian personality. Without strong laws and restraints on their love of pleasure, including the pleasures of art and learning, Italians resort to the modern, chemical solution: birth control. In a weird way, it is precisely because Italians are so Italian that they are having few children. Once marriage becomes primarily a matter of emotional satisfaction, of perfecting life and making it artful, there isn’t much compulsion to marry, unless circumstances are just right. The Church once provided Italians with restraints while satisfying their sensual instincts with rites and ceremony and at the same time encouraging detachment from earthly pleasures. The Italians have fallen very far but in their essential nature have not changed much. They constitute a highly advanced culture that cannot remain highly advanced as long as they refuse children.

— Comments —

Fred Owens writes:

I encountered a delightful Italian family in, of all places, Santa Barbara, California. It was a soft summer evening and we were relaxing on blankets on the courthouse lawn, with hundreds of other people, waiting for the free outdoor Alfred Hitchcock movie to begin.

We knew it would get cold after sundown, so we brought sweaters, but the young family in front of us were obviously unprepared, so my girlfriend offered them our spare blanket. The woman said thank you and a conversation began.

A man, a woman, in their early 40s, and three ( three! ) children, one teenager, one pre-teen, and one seven-year-old, and joining them on the courthouse lawn, were the woman’s grey-haired mother and father — all from Mantua, Italy, the father being a professor hired to teach a summer course at our state university.

What a lovely Italian family, so stylishly dressed as you can imagine.

I guess they didn’t get the memo.

Don Vincenzo writes:

What must also be mentioned in describing the decline of the Italian nuclear family is that Italy is the last major economic power of Western Europe to succumb to the marvels of modernism and its baleful impact on families. [Laura writes: The birthrate in Italy has been low for many years.]  In smaller and less economically developed nations such as Malta, the contagion of Western progressivism has not yet extended its long reach into that island nation – not yet, anyway.

Any analysis of this problem must recognize that at the core of this drastic reorientation of family life is one significant factor: the decline of religious fervor within these countries, and this applies to both Protestant, as well as Catholic, countries. In Spain, formerly a bastion of the Church, priestly vocations and church attendance have dwindled so much that that the Society of Jesus – aka Jesuits – have now moved to consolidate their five “provinces,” or regions where seminaries and schools are located, into one; this the land of the founder of the Order, Ignatius Loyola. Similar comments can be made of Ireland.

In Protestant countries, the same situation prevails: while I lived in Norway in the late 1980s, it was said that a man went to church four times in his life: when he was baptized, received first communion, was married and died.

But if the dying embers of religious belief and fervor are fading in the West, one spark of hope is that in Eastern Europe that decline is not nearly as visible. Perhaps, and only perhaps, the rekindling of Christian belief and its concomitant resurrection of the importance of family will come from an unexpected place, and we need to turn our eyes ad orientam to see that possibility realized.

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