A New Pact for Birth

“The Future is a Pact”: this was the theme chosen for the National Assembly of the Forum of Family Associations which ended a few days ago in Rome.. “A pact” – the Forum Assembly explained - “with our children, with future generations, from whom we have borrowed this time we are living, a pact for birth”. This initiative ends three years of activity and opens a new four-year period with the definition of new programmatic guidelines and the re-election of the national Chairman, Gigi De Palo.

A video message opened the concluding works in which the Chairman of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), Cardinal Gualtieri Bassetti, affirmed that: “Italy needs you.  Italy needs hundreds of thousands of family nuclei to make it live!”; “Have faith in this pact for birth which we have defined with the institutions.  It must be our strength!”.

Chairman De Palo then focussed on the main proposal of the Forum: “We urgently need a Pact for Birth. We must place young people in the position to build families”. De Palo also mentioned some social and cultural issues: “In fact, if before, children were born by default, now the starting point is the absence of children and, on the contrary, opening up towards life requires a deliberate and aware decision sustained by positive conditions”. 

“I am convinced that if Italy today is like a barren land” – he said –“it is not because it is not potentially fertile, but chiefly because this land has been cultivated badly over the years”.  To sustain this theory, De Palo illustrated research data that shows 90% of young Italians would like to have two or more children and that the same percentage of young people would say they were “proud” when their son or daughter was on the way. “Demography is a non-negotiable principle” – De Palo remarked – “and we cannot accept the fact that a family, even though it would like a child, is frightened of having one”.