Slum Children Can Taste Good

Pope Benedict XVI is in either Washington or New York (not Boston) today, his visit partially supported by sales of Pope On A Rope soap ($9.99), a Pope bobblehead ($12.95), Pope Benedict T-shirts ($15.95), and Pope’s Cologne ($25.95). The cologne is supposedly developed by a California doctor named Fred Haas from a secret formula used by Pius IX, pope from 1846 to 1878. It is marketed in this country by Monastery Greetings. I still remember when Pope John Paul visited Mexico and the hot seller was potato chips embossed with the image of the pope.

I was not surprised that the groups raising money are not selling bedsheets monogrammed by Pope Benedict. When Catholics were celebrating a jubilee some years ago the planners established 400 stores around the world to sell Catholic “religious” items. They had a deal with the Vatican to sell mongrammed bedsheets signed by Pope John Paul. I thought it was absolutely hilarious that my church until I was 27 years old, with its rules, canons, pronouncements, and papal bulls about sex, would sell such a “hot” item. I wrote a column about what Roman Catholics could do on sanctified sheets—and still stay within the rules. I was promptly fired by another newspaper. Evidently the owner was Catholic.

I understand that one of the reasons for the papal visit is to encourage Catholics to have more babies because the Muslims have surpassed the Catholic Church in total numbers. Vatican spokesman Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, compiler of the Vatican yearbook, has used United Nations population research to determine that Muslims have a higher birth “replacement” rate, now representing 19.2 percent of the world’s population compared to the Catholics 17.4 percent. This is the first time in recorded history that Catholicism is not the largest religion. Monsignor Formenti added: “It is true that while Muslim families continue to make (!) a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer.”

Why Aren’t Catholic Italians On The Make?

In 2002 Pope John Paul talked about the “crisis of births” in Europe and Italy in a speech to the Italian Parliament, describing the “tragedy” of childless European couples. When Benedict became Pope he made an Italian peasant woman a saint because she raised 12 children. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi then offered a $1,000 “baby bonus” to parents who had a second child.

In order to maintain a level population in most industrialized countries couples must produce 2.1 children. Here are current reproductive rates in some European countries: Ireland-1.99, France-1.90, Norway-1.81, Sweden-1.75, United Kingdom-1.74, Netherlands-1.73, Germany-1.37, Italy-1.33, Spain-1.32, Greece-1.29.

By the way, Osama Bin Laden’s father, Sheik Mohamed, had 22 wives and 53 sons and daughters. I guess it all depends on how you interpret the Koran. Some Islamic clerics declare that the Koran allows up to four wives per man after a war so that all the war orphans left to widows are cared for. Some clerics say the Koran bars polygamy—but they don’t interpret how many years after a war.

The Irish, Swedes, and Norwegians generally stick to one mate, whether married or not, and do their best, but they still fail to provide “replacement” babies as you can see from the list. Although the Swedish and Norwegian governments provide the best incentives for having children in all of Europe—flexible working times for both parents, high quality free childcare, higher pay for women—those attractive policies still do not inspire people to “replacement” level.

Second-place France has attractive packages of tax and cash incentives and has the most highly rated healthcare system in the world, but Frenchmen seem to concentrate on wine and song instead of women. My parents would both say “That’s life.” In French, of course.

If Italy, although 90 percent Catholic, maintains it current rate of births, its population could shrink by a third by 2050 unless they agree to many immigrants. A town in Italy is currently offering 10,000 euros (about $16,000 in today’s money) for each newborn baby.

Can The World Really Use More Babies?

Popes and politicians always want more babies. Popes want to outnumber the Muslims and any other upstart religion. Politicians always want more babies so their friends can get rich because their countries have “economic growth.” The world’s population reached 6,659,646,142 on April 6, 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The question is, when is enough “enough”? Over one billion people live on a dollar a day.

The United Nations completed a survey of slums and slum dwellers in 2001 and determined that 924 million people lived in slums. It found that in least developed countries 78.2 percent of the urban population live in slums. If we count all urban areas fully one-third of all urban residents live in slums, with one-half of the slum population under the age of 25.

According to this survey Ethopia has 99.4 percent of its urban dwellers in slums; Chad has 99.1 percent, Afghanistan 98.5 percent, and Nepal 92.4 percent. A UN correspondent described Lagos, Nigeria as a city with the worst collection of slums in the world. No one knows what the population of the city is. Some say it may have over 10 million although officially it has six million. His description: “Unlit highways run past canyons of smouldering garbage before giving way to to dirt streets weaving through 200 slums, their sewers running with raw waste.” An estimated 57 percent of urban Africans lack access to basic sanitation. The poor carry “flying toilets” with them at all times. These are plastic grocery bags saved by the poor in which they urinate and defecate. The U.N. figures that two out of five African slum dwellers live in areas so poor that their lives are constantly threatened by disease.

In Bombay, India poorer districts have a ratio of 500 inhabitants to one toilet seat. In Manila only 11 percent of poor districts have any semblance of santitation.

The Village Can be A Terrible Place For Many

I imagine you have seen the “Summary of the World” if it were a village of 100 people:
* 70 people would be of color, 30 would be white.

* 50% of all the world’s wealth would be in the hands of only six people.

* 70 of the people would be unable to read.

* 50 would suffer from malnutrition.

* 80 would live in substandard housing.

* Only one person would have a college education.

So here we have Pope Benedict running around the world urging Catholic couples to have more babies so Catholics can outnumber Muslims! The U.S. Department of Agriculture has determined it takes about $200,000 to raise a child to age 17. Add $12,000 to $30,000 a year to that total if the child goes to college.

What happens to children in third world countries who are lucky enough to survive infancy? Dr. Mavis Stoch outlines the problems of children born to poverty: “Youngsters who are gravely undernourished from birth have smaller heads, lower intelligence quotients and less coordination between brain and body. Even when the poorly fed children are given better living conditions, there is cumulative and impressive evidence that undernutrition during infancy has caused permanent retardation of brain growth and defective intellectual development.”

I thought it particularly ironic that during the hoopla about the Pope’s visit, Catholic Brazil announced that it was building a big condom plant near rubber plantations so that it would not have to import huge numbers of condoms from other countries. The magazine “The Nation” also has an article about Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s decision to distribute emergency-contraception to women of all income levels. Chile is a Catholic country where abortion is illegal. She is currently being sued by 36 conservative legislators who are trying to block her decision.

This is what happens when two major religions in the world, using “rules” adopted before, during, and after the Dark Ages, treat women as chattel, cattle, breeders, and sex objects in the 21st century. In Muslim countries women wearing black burqas can drive camels but not automobiles, and need four witnesses to charge a man with rape. In Catholic countries women can give birth to popes, but can’t say Mass in church or become a Prada-dressed cardinal. Positively medieval.

Before advocating the “making” of more children perhaps Pope Benedict and his Vatican staff should read Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children Of Poor People In Ireland From Being A Burden To Their Parents And Country, And For Making Them Beneficial To The Public.” According to Swift, even slum children, if properly nursed, at a year are “most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled…and will equally serve in a fricasse or a ragout.”