The Graph presents a period from about 1825 through about 2125. From a relatively stable history through 1900 of less than 2 billion people, the world's population doubles within shorter and shorter periods of time. Using the words of others, the cause was not that 'we have been breeding like rabbits, but that we were not dying like flies'. Health care increased our longevity. Counter-intuitively, but simultaneously, our fertility rate dropped from 6 per child-bearing woman to the present falling rate of 1.54. World population will top-out around 8 billion around the year 2050, and it will be dominated by the elderly. It will then begin a decline that competent demographers already anticipate with certitude. Even the U N's Population division, one of the most prominent promoters of anti-natalist population limits (which they euphemistically justify under the label of "sustainable development"), revels in a drop of many billions of persons in 50 years. The UN Population Division does not provide any support for an end to the drop, other than a vague and unexplained expectation that the fertility rate will somehow settle at 1.85. The persons left between 2100 and 2125 will be dominated, even more completely, by persons beyond child-bearing age as a cumulative result of the disappearing fertility rate. And yet, reality is much graver, as even a casual referral to the Graph reveals. A 1.5 fertility rate in 2050 simply means we will not replace ourselves, and that rate is probably the best we may expect as survivors face the future with less and less optimism and less and less willingness to undertake the burden of child-rearing.

As we move toward 2050, the more and more obvious radical aging of the world's population and the fast-diminishing proportion of young people to support their physical and economic needs will only begin to announce the grimmer consequences yet to follow. Social Security arrangements in all the world's developed economies will become intolerable. Society and governments will likely come adrift. Older persons without family assistance will be put in grave situations as interdependencies will be grievously affected. The dislocations and dilemmas we are already seeing in some countries even today, such as in Russia (a population that is shrinking by nearly 1 million/year and at an increasing rate) and Japan (I recently heard that a most of Japan's work force will be gone in the next 50 years), China, countries of Africa, Latvia, Spain, Italy, France and even the U.S. (despite its immigration of Southern peoples), are only the mildest indication of what is to come in the sudden and uncontrollable collapse of populations world-wide.

We may ask ourselves, is any of this avoidable in any way? Is there any mitigating intervention that is possible? What should be our attitude toward family life and the goals of society's most basic unit, in the light of such a dismal forecast? Most importantly, how does this fit in with our role in fulfilling God's Will in the world, the objectives of His Church, and how we can organize ourselves, as a people on Earth, into a functioning temporal Communion of Saints that permeates society and transforms it, even as it is being punished, cleansed and purified for its awful anti-populist offenses to God? The words of Scripture should resonate in our ears with concern: "When He comes again, will He find Faith on the Earth?"

The key to understanding the Graph is the continuous drop of the fertility rate over the last 50 years which it presents. Nothing in the Graph reveals any mitigation of the collapsing situation, but just as the fertility rate is the cause of the impending situation, any reversal of that rate in today's world would also present the answer to the possibility of a long-term recovery and the softening of the end result. An answer can only be found in children and a return to truly generous family life founded in a serious Human/Christian/Catholic reliance on, and response to an incredibly generous God (while simultaneously knowing that we must expect to share in the purifying consequences of history). Everyone is free and the difficulties parents can anticipate may well seduce even persons with a deep religious sense an into an essentially extinction mentality. The "White Pestilence", which is anticipated in the later part of this Century, will certainly be worse than the unanticipated "Black Death" of the past. The difference between hope and the worst anticipatable outcome will certainly depend on heralding the Christian Gospel by Christians who live it to the full in the hope of Salvation. Christians will have to make a great ‘Venture for Faith’ in a revolution "which has in it a great risk of what we think we have in this world, for what we do not yet have in the life hereafter." (Cdl. Newman in Ventures of Faith). Begin the revolution by reading Mosher's book.

^* Population Control, Steve Mosher, 2008, Transaction Publishers