Behind St. Peter’s Basilica is a narrow road leading north past a gauntlet of gendarmerie and up a gentle slope. Where it crests, the pines and cedars of Lebanon that shade the Vatican Gardens’ lawns give way below to an illusion of climate shift, in the form of a stand of date palms from the Canary Islands.
The palms flank an oval marble courtyard and a sumptuous villa encrusted with ornate stucco reliefs, a building begun in 1558 as a summer home for Pope Paul IV, who died before he ever slept there. Three years later, it was completed by his successor, Pope Pius IV, who directed its architect to sculpt an extravagant exterior montage of what at first seems to have little to do with Christianity. Instead, the imagery hearkens to mythology: Apollo, the Muses, Pan, Medusa, and even Bacchus, with the heavens represented by the zodiac. But to the erudite Renaissance mind, Casina Pio IV’s façade symbolized the Church’s triumph over pagan beliefs that preceded it, which reduced icons of Greece’s classical pantheon to allegories of the victorious Christian world. On the gleaming white walls, Hercules and Cybele evoked Christ and the Virgin—as did, on the casina’s fountain loggia, Adonis and Venus, and Jupiter and Amalthea.
Above the tabernacle facing the courtyard was Pius IV’s coat of arms followed by the words Pontifex Optimus Maximus: pontiff supreme. The casina’s interior featured the prevailing canon, its vaulted ceilings lavishly frescoed with scenes from Genesis and Exodus to the life and agony of Christ and his encounters with various saints.
Casina Pio 4, Vatican
PHOTOGRAPH BY CATARINA BELOVA/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
Since 1936, Casina Pio IV has housed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Intended to demonstrate that faith and science are compatible, it dates to 1847, when shortly after his election, Pope Pius IX resurrected a former Roman scientific academy once led by Galileo. Today, about eighty scientists from around the world are members, a quarter of them Nobel laureates. Its roster includes non-Catholics, and even suspected atheists such as physicist Stephen Hawking. Several times a year, its scientists meet to discuss relevant contemporary issues and publish the proceedings.
In the early years of his nearly thirty-two-year reign, the Academy’s founder, Pius IX, was a popular liberal reformer. He was also the last head of the Papal States—land that encompassed much of today’s central Italy, which the Church had acquired from wealthy adherents, including emperors Constantine and Charlemagne. Italian nationalists, however, eventually stripped the church-state of all its territory save 110 acres that comprise today’s Vatican City—and turned the populist pope into a reactionary. Pius IX is best recalled not for his enlightened incorporation of a scientific body within the Church, but for convoking the First Vatican Council in 1868 to bolster Catholicism against rising secular tides.
The most memorable achievement of Vatican I was the declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility. Unprecedented in Church history, it stated unequivocally that on matters of morals and faith, the Pope’s teachings are divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, and thus irreversible. That declaration would later bring the Church and Pius IX’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences to an embarrassing impasse.
Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, sits at a long, polished hardwood table in Casina Pio IV beneath a Zuccari fresco of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. He is Argentine, in his early seventies, tall with a straight nose, thick eyebrows, and a receding gray hairline that has reached the top of his head. A gold cross on a chain and rimless reading glasses hang over his black jacket and black clerical shirt. A professor of philosophy, Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo assumed his position here five years after the events of 1994 that caused that impasse and enraged Pope John Paul II, who appointed him.
In September 1994, the third decennial United Nations Conference on Population and Development was scheduled to meet in Cairo. Two years earlier, the Vatican had scuttled efforts by ecologists to address the matter of population at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Now, it again had to ensure that, as the Pontifical Council for the Family described it that spring in a treatise titled Ethical and Pastoral Dimensions of Population Trends, “alarmist views concerning world population” would not prevail among attending nations.
Strategizing to thwart family-planning programs was nothing new here. For decades, the Holy See had infiltrated groups such as Planned Parenthood with moles. After years of pressure, Catholic U.S. congressmen, backed by the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, had forced out the director of USAID’s Office of Population, Dr. Reimert Ravenholt, author of the agency’s international family-planning programs since its inception. For the coming UN population conference, John Paul II directed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to prepare a white paper on the state of population on the planet. He had reason to feel confident: The Pontifical Council for the Family, which he created in 1981, was reporting that world population growth rates had peaked between 1965 and 1970 and were now naturally declining. In the coming century, they predicted, there would be no more quadrupling; growth rates might be only one-third of the former exponential frenzy.
The Pontifical Council for the Family was comprised of cardinals, bishops, and married couples, but no scientists. Now, three members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, along with demographers and an economist, were chosen to produce a report that ostensibly would concur with the Council, and validate the Vatican’s position at the Cairo population conference.
In June 1994 they released their report. Over seventy-seven pages, Popolazione e Risorse (Population and Resources) tracked global and regional demographic and economic trends. It examined natural resources, technological development, water, and food production, including the Green Revolution. It considered education, family issues, women’s issues, labor, culture, religion, morals, and ethics. Taking into account the time frame in which all these variables interacted, it concluded:
It does not seem possible that population can grow indefinitely in the long term. With the capacity humans have acquired to control sickness and death, which will plausibly increase, it is now consequently unthinkable to sustain indefinitely a birthrate beyond 2.3 children per couple to guarantee replacement. The contrary demographic consequences would be unsustainable to the point of absurdity…. [Given] the long-term consequences created by the decline of mortality, there is an inescapable need for a global containment of births, which must be met with scientific and economic progress and all the intellectual and moral energies of mankind to assure respect, equity, and social justice among all parts of the planet, and between present and future generations.
“That,” snaps Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo, “was the committee’s opinion. Not the Academy’s.”
In the days that followed the report’s release by the Italian bishops’ conference, Vatican spokesmen attempted to parse the Vatican’s policy from the recommendation of its own august scientific body.
“It was not,” declared the secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family, “a synthesis of the work done, but merely an illustration of the data and of the problems which emerged, accompanied by some editorial considerations.”
“The Academy’s task,” said Vatican Radio, “is to contribute to scientific progress, [not to be] an expression of Church teachings or of the Holy See’s pastoral strategies.”
The Pope, reportedly livid, may have wondered why he hadn’t assigned the task to a new advisory team of scientists he had recently founded, the Pontifical Academy for Life, to support the Vatican’s antiabortion and anticontraception campaigns. But with its Nobel laureates and international credibility, he did not have the option of disbanding the esteemed Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Five years later, when Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo became the Academy’s chancellor, following a study week titled Science for Survival and Sustainable Development, Academy members issued another provocative statement:
Our planet is threatened by a multitude of interactive processes—the depletion of natural resources; climatic changes; population growth (from 2.5 billion to over 6 billion people in just 50 years); a rapidly growing disparity in the quality of life; the destabilization of the ecological economy; and the disruption of social order.
Like the warnings of Greek choruses depicted on Casina Pio IV’s façade, voices of Academy scientists rise to counsel cardinals and Popes about extraordinary developments at an extraordinary point in God’s creation, warranting extraordinary measures. Today, with population at 7 billion and racing beyond 10, what is the Church’s response?
“When I was in the seminary,” says Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo, “people said a time was coming when we wouldn’t be able to eat because of population growth. It never happened. When sociologists of my generation recommended birth control, the Pope opposed it. Now, it turns out, the Pope was right. You don’t hear of overpopulation anymore. Today’s sociologists are worried about population decline. Europe’s population is diminishing.”
Not exactly yet, although population growth on the European continent has, in fact, slowed to the point that decline could one day set in. In few places is that truer than Catholic Italy, where the birth rate is below 1.4 children per fertile woman.
“This a big concern,” says Sánchez Sorondo, rocking in his leather chair. “It’s more than just being a Catholic country: Italy’s tradition was the family.” He touches his fingertips together. “We bishops are very alarmed.”
Yet Italian public schools aren’t full of empty seats and desks, because immigrant children from overflowing Africa and Asia, as well as eastern Europe, are filling the breach. Italy has its own counterpart to the British National Party, the anti-immigrant—and especially anti-Muslim—Lega Nord. Unlike the fringe BNP, Lega Nord is among the most powerful parties in northern Italy, for which it has advocated autonomy—and at times outright secession—from the rest of the country.
Anti-immigration politics is problematic for the Church, which ministers to refugees in Italy. The refugees’ very existence, however, underscores an uncomfortable reality: Other continents have more people than can be fed. Such hungry hordes produce many more children than Europeans, whose infant mortality rates are nearly zero, whose family livelihoods don’t depend on child labor, and who have ready access to contraceptives, even in the long shadow of St. Peter’s.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI addressed this convergence of poverty and population in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth). In it he denounced the global market economy for squeezing salaries, social security, and workers’ rights to maximize profits, locking poor countries into competing in a race to the bottom of wages and benefits for factory jobs that bring more misery than actual development. He condemned consumer temptations that undermine people’s values and their planet.
During his papacy, the first of the new millennium, Benedict XVI became known as the “green Pope” for installing thousands of photovoltaic cells atop the Vatican auditorium, and for his open disgust at the failure of the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen. In Caritas in Veritate, he declared: “The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone.”
But he rejected any conflict between that moral environmental imperative and maintaining a growing population:
Human beings legitimately exercise a responsible stewardship over nature, to protect it, to enjoy its fruits and to cultivate it in new ways with advanced technologies, so that it can accommodate and feed the world’s population. On this earth there is room for everyone: here the entire human family must find the resources to live with dignity, through the help of nature itself—God’s gift to his children—and through hard work and creativity. At the same time we must recognize our grave duty to hand the earth on to future generations in such a condition that they too can worthily inhabit it and continue to cultivate it.
Nature will help humans if humans help nature: It sounds simple, except the number of humans keeps increasing, even as nature’s bounty does the opposite. How to feed “everyone” without sacrificing our remaining carbon-absorbing forests, says Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo, is what the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has been charged to solve. And he believes they have.
He turns to the shelves behind him, lined with leather-bound volumes. Their gold-embossed titles glint beneath crystal wall sconces retrofitted with multiple compact fluorescent bulbs. Not finding what he wants, he calls toward the doorway in a sonorous baritone amplified by the vaulted ceiling. A priest appears with the proceedings from a recent Academy study week, titled Transgenic Plants for Food Security.
“Food isn’t running out,” he says, opening to the report’s table of contents. “New crop species are coming in. Developing countries are living off them—Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, most of all. They’re producing nothing else, and selling them in Asia. People who were poor are getting rich—they’re making more by growing transgenic soy than by raising cattle.”
Some articles in the proceedings describe the case of golden rice, a genetic modification that inserts genes from daffodils, corn, and soil bacteria into rice to make it produce beta-carotene, which in turn produces vitamin A. The idea was to combat the world’s millions of cases of blindness and death from vitamin A deficiency. Golden rice was first developed in Switzerland, with subsequent improvements by affiliates of IRRI, the International Rice Research Institute, in the Philippines, the tropical counterpart to CIMMYT, Mexico’s wheat and maize center. Its grains are golden-orange like a sweet potato, for the same reason: beta-carotene.
Although its flavor is indistinguishable from white rice, and it was developed more than a decade ago, golden rice has yet to become available due to wide opposition to genetically modified crops. One fear is that transgenic plants might crossbreed and permanently alter strains in nature, meaning a loss of crop biodiversity.1 The Vatican study was devoted to disabusing that notion, on the grounds that today’s crops have been selected by humans over millennia to improve them, so none remotely resembles its ancestors.
Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo turns to an entry by renowned ecologist and Academy member Peter Raven, longtime director of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
“Dr. Raven says transgenics actually help conserve biodiversity.” During the study, Raven presented a paper stating that at the rate species are being killed off worldwide, by 2100 two-thirds may be gone: an extinction equivalent to the event that obliterated the same proportion of the world’s life-forms 65 million years ago, including the dinosaurs. In that case, an asteroid the size of a small town smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula; in this case, the asteroid is the human race. One thing that might help, Raven proposed, is planting transgenic crops, which can be grown intensively and therefore take less land away from other plant species than conventional agriculture. He dismissed as a myth the concern that these genetically altered strains might hybridize so readily with their wild relatives that the latter would vanish.
If Sánchez Sorondo is aware that Peter Raven’s scientific prestige dates to a classic 1964 paper on the coevolution of butterflies and plants he coauthored with an entomologist named Paul Ehrlich, it is a detail he ignores.
“If transgenic food wasn’t healthy,” he says, “nature would rebel against it. Like when you feed meat to a cow, you get mad cow disease. The Church believes that if things were only better regulated economically, there would be plenty of food for everybody.”
In part, this argument refers to Pope Benedict XVI’s invectives against food becoming less human sustenance than marketable commodity. But it may also respond to American diplomatic persuasion. Having ingratiated itself in Rome by defunding foreign aid for any family-planning program that mentioned abortion, the George W. Bush administration lobbied the Vatican on behalf of biotech agro-industries, asserting that the way to feed the world’s hungry is with GM crops. This lobbying effort was intended to counter Catholic clergy in poor countries who oppose genetically altered grains. Because new genetic strains are hybrids that often can’t reproduce or lose their vigor if they do, farmers must buy new seed every year, as well as the fertilizers and chemical protection needed to cultivate them. Even the conservative African Synod of Catholic Bishops has accused agro-technology of “risking the ruin of small landowners by abolishing traditional methods of seeding, and making farmers dependent on companies” that produce GMOs.
Apparently, they have been overruled. “As the Holy Father said, there will be enough food in the future for all,” repeats Sánchez Sorondo. “The Church is showing that the new transgenic methods can help bring this about.”
Yet scientists at both IRRI and CIMMYT warn that transgenic leaps to feed the world are decades away from being viable—let alone discovered. And Green Revolution founder Norman Borlaug insisted that it will be impossible to keep feeding the whole world unless population growth is also checked.
“That’s not what the Church believes. The Church believes in Providence. That fellow apparently didn’t.”
But how far does Providence extend? When Pope Benedict XVI wrote of enough room and resources for everybody, did he mean every living species, not just human beings?
“Both humans and animals are subject to natural laws that have taken scientists time to decipher and understand,” Sánchez Sorondo replies after a pause. “We have to respect the natural laws.”
Another pause. The Academy, he admits, has never actually studied how human population growth might trespass on biodiversity. “But to respect nature doesn’t mean that you just stand there admiring it. Pope Paul VI once said that the goal of a scientist should be to develop the potential of nature for the benefit of man and of nature itself. We must understand how nature functions, what its laws are. And then, perfect it.”
Is natural law immutable? Or is it law that changes with time, circumstance, or interpretation? It might be said that biological laws evolve, but the laws of physics don’t: a chance mutation might skew a living lineage off on some wild new angle, while the law of gravity seems unlikely ever to be repealed. But in the Catholic Church, law became immutable from the moment in 1870 when Pope Pius IX and his advisors realized that, bereft of their Papal States, their territory reduced to less than half a square mile, with only a thousand or so citizens (nearly all male, as today) their power was essentially gone. Unless…
Thus Vatican I, which sealed the notion of papal infallibility. It was an idea that had been broached over centuries, with arguments pro and con even among Popes. It was also suspected of being a Protestant rumor meant to vilify the Catholic Pope for such a presumptuous claim. But now, for the first time since biblical prophets and apostles, the word spoken by a man—the Bishop of Rome—on matters of faith and dogma would be not mere opinion or command, but divine revelation. The authority of God Himself was infused in the Pope.
Power restored. But papal infallibility was a sword that cut two ways. As the late Vatican historian Father August Bernhard Hasler noted, if the Pope’s teachings were infallible by virtue of being Pope, then the teachings of all Popes were infallible. A new Pope was locked into—and limited by—what was now the inviolable word of his predecessors. Overturning precedent was not an option.
Therefore, on controversial positions that perplex modern progressive Catholics over their Church’s seemingly ossified stance against contraception, ordination of women or married men, or acceptance of homosexuals, the reality is that the Church has little choice, because it has painted itself into an ever tighter corner. As Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, would write for the dissenting opinion to the overwhelming (69–10) majority of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control that advised Paul XI to relax the sanction against artificial birth control:
If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches…. It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half century the Holy Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned.
Those words provided a key passage in the minority opinion that persuaded the Pope to write Humanae Vitae, rejecting the majority that favored contraception. To do otherwise would have undercut the stoutest remaining pillar of the Church’s foundation: the absolute authority of the Pope.
“The Church has never been against birth control,” says Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson. “It’s just a problem of method.”
Cardinal Turkson heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Although its official mandate mentions neither nature nor ecology, in one of the mysteries of the Roman Catholic curia, it is the branch of the Vatican’s bureaucracy that takes the lead on environmental issues. Before becoming its president in 2009, Turkson was archbishop of the ecclesiastical province of Cape Coast in his native Ghana. With the world’s highest birth rates, Africa also is where Catholicism enjoys its fastest growth; Turkson’s former archdiocese is famous for training and exporting priests to other countries where Catholic clergy have become an endangered breed, such as the United States.2
The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace is housed in Rome’s seventeenth-century Palazzo San Callisto, a four-story complex three miles from the Vatican, owned by the Holy See as an extraterritorial property under treaty with Italy. Its office is spare, with pale walls and plain, dark wood-trimmed doorways and windows. Portraits of popes past and current hang above cases of multilingual pamphlets and books published by the Council on topics such as ethical development, disarmament, and fairness in global financing. Compared to the opulent Pontifical Academy of Sciences, its modest countenance resembles that of a human rights NGO.
Cardinal Turkson has a broad, gently smiling face, with a cloud of gray frizz above a high, prominent brow. He explains that the Church, in fact, supports several kinds of contraception—each based, he says, on the fact that “a woman can always tell if she’s ovulating.”
He actually took a class in Australia, he adds, in a technique known as the Billings ovulation method. “They called me their first bishop student.” The Billings method teaches a woman how to recognize the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle. “Without even inserting any finger into anything—just by, you know, touching—she can feel the mucus that begins to appear and notify the husband. Something like that, we encourage.”
There are several ways, he says, for women to alert their spouses. “Some put a green leaf on the bed. That indicates to your husband that you’re ovulating. When you see it’s over, you put a red leaf.”
It is disconcerting, if not surreal, to hear a Catholic cardinal—and one frequently mentioned as a prospect for the papacy—discuss vaginal mucus, especially when the topic was supposed to be the environment. But all environmental issues quickly lead to the fact that there are more humans than the system can comfortably hold, including the issues Cardinal Turkson himself lists: the need to clean the air, cut CO2, and slash Rome’s satanic traffic. Lamenting the hours that Italians lose hunting for a parking place, he calls for more mass transit, and bicycles to save fuel. He considers it a crime that a crucial measure of economic success in Europe is how many cars people can be convinced to buy.
“When the Volkswagen was invented, their slogan was ein Auto für jedermann: ‘a car for everybody.’ Then when everybody has one, there’s hardly any space to park, so cars get smaller and smaller. Then, you know what happens next: Families want two cars, and you double the problem.”
Overconsumption is unquestionably deplorable, but taken alone, it also deflects from the obvious: that too many cars result from too many people. That, in turn, results in the awkward spectacle of a kindly, intelligent man who someday might be leader of the world’s Christians—at least according to the Roman Catholic Church—pretending he doesn’t know that sperm can live inside a woman for up to six days preceding ovulation, regularly foiling contraceptive methods based on mucus, temperature, or calendars.
Lurking behind such contortions of learned men who are genuinely worried about melting poles and deepening droughts, yet who still insist that a million more of us every four days or so is a blessing, is a simple accounting cipher. Even an infallible pope has little power if his flock shrinks too far. Like Yasser Arafat’s womb-weapon and the overbreeding of Israel’s haredim, the Church has a fundamental, vested interest in bodies. The more Catholics there are in the world, the more the judgment of the 1,000 male citizens of Vatican City matters.
Cardinal Turkson has seen enough African suffering and starvation in a world with 7 billion to know what it will be like with 10 billion. Moreover, he heads a Vatican council charged with moral guidance regarding questions now shaking seven continents and roiling the seas: questions such as ethical dilemmas over which species to save and which get sacrificed, dilemmas that might never arise with fewer people cornering all the room and resources. Yet his Church insists there’s room for everyone, and that it’s a punishable sin to use effective means to prevent adding more.
Cardinal Turkson knows, yet he can’t disobey dogma. He cites Pope Benedict’s 2009 annual World Day of Peace message, when the pontiff said that we need to live in solidarity with the future and with other dependents on the Earth. “You know. Like animals.”
Yet ecologists contend that this not just about expressing solidarity, but about mutual survival. Can there be a home for humans here without a supporting cast of characters, whose numbers perhaps only God can know?
In his plain wooden chair, he sinks into contemplation of this question. “When God began to create the world,” he finally says, “it was chaos. Then God said let there be this and let there be that. The chaos transformed into a cosmos, into a beautiful, orderly system. That transformation was through the Word of God. For me as a Christian, that means that without the Word of God, we’re likely to go back to chaos again. I would be worried if I was not a man of faith. I would be worried if I didn’t believe in a God who our Scripture says has not created this world to be in chaos.”
But if we have entered a time where our planet seems to be bursting its seams and popping its rivets, might there be Scriptural justification for thinking about restraint?
The cardinal takes a deep, thoughtful breath.
“It makes a lot of sense to practice restraint. There are biblical instances of a time to do this, and a time not to do that. Unfortunately, our culture has gone through an evolution that makes it difficult to hear Ecclesiastes saying that there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain. Now, there’s always time to do, and never a time to refrain from anything. Everybody knows how to celebrate Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, but nobody thinks about the abstinence that Ash Wednesday calls for. Does Mardi Gras make sense if it’s just Mardi Gras?
“As for restraining from sex: in the animal world, a dog or a cat will not accept a mate unless it’s in heat. It’s only human beings who make love both in and out of season. But there is a viable alternative to which we could invite people…”
He stops and looks at the floor. Then he raises his eyes.
“I was going to say that if we lived our celibacy faithfully, we could offer it as an eloquent message to the world that such action is possible,” he says softly. “But the eloquence of this message has been badly compromised.”
It would seem that the spectacle of a Church exposed for abetting widespread serial child rape might finally mute its dicta that sex is only for “responsible procreation,” not pleasure or entertainment. But the Vatican is the oldest of political echo chambers, St. Peter’s resonant dome enlarging its proclamations in the ears of the proclaimers—even as right outside Vatican walls, few hear or care. Studies show that 98 percent of the Catholic women in the United States have used contraception; in Catholic Italy, the figure may be lower—but only due to a lingering cultural preference, particularly in conservative northern Italy, for coitus interruptus, also a forbidden sin to the Vatican. The fact that Italy nevertheless has one of the lowest fertility rates anywhere is partly explained by the success of parliamentarian Emma Bonino to legalize abortion in 1978, a campaign instigated after her own clandestine abortion. Church attempts to muzzle her were ignored; her long government career includes serving as vice president of the Italian Senate and as foreign minister.
In the 1990s, Italian women had the world’s lowest birthrate, 1.12 children apiece, only to be passed in 2001 by Catholic Spain. With one of the world’s highest percentages of women with doctorates—more Italian women have PhDs than men—Italy is poster-worthy proof that education lowers birthrates. Yet the details are complicated.
Sabrina Provenzani sits on the floor with her old college friend, Licia Capparella, whose three-year-old twins, Michelangelo and Adrian, are investigating her luxurious thick hair, comparing it to their mother’s long brown curls. It is January 2011; Sabrina, a producer for the public broadcasting network Radio Televisione Italiana, has the day off because the CEO has once more suspended her program under pressure from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The prime minister—whose days finally seem numbered—is lately mired in one of his more lurid scandals, involving a seventeen-year-old Moroccan immigrant dancer. Because Sabrina’s program covered the affair, Berlusconi is again threatening them.
What infuriated Sabrina most were the wiretaps that surfaced: hearing parents and siblings of several girls saying yes, go with him, he’s a generous man, it will set our future. These days in Italy, it’s easy to find girls who’ll leap to earn €7,000 in one night, rather than €7003 a month. Women may be Italy’s most educated sector, but they’re also the worst compensated. For more years than she cares to remember, Sabrina has been working twelve hours a day producing a TV show with 1.6 million viewers, but getting paid the same as a Fiat factory worker. The network deftly sidesteps a law prohibiting too many consecutive monthly contracts by paying her weekly as a consultant, not as a staffer eligible for benefits.
She and her husband, Emilio, a software designer, have now reached their late thirties, a time they’d always hoped to have enough economic stability to start a family. But as Licia is reminding her, working women who dare to have children risk everything.
For years, Licia worked for one of Italy’s oldest nature NGOs. She wrote about animals, ran their website, and loved her job. She worked from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., often came in on weekends, and was loved in return by her superiors—until she got pregnant.
“Silly me. I came running into work, all excited to tell my boss.”
Despite the frigid reception, she kept working. Even when she’d faint in the subway, she kept going to the office, working through the summer when nobody else wanted to. “After six months, when I got too fat with the twins and took maternity leave, I kept calling in to see if I could help by working from bed, even though that’s illegal. That’s when they told me they weren’t renewing my contract.”
Actually, they’d never given her a legal contract. For three years she’d had a string of temporary six-month contracts, even though the law required full contractual health benefits and five months’ maternity leave following the second renewal.
“Yeah, right,” says Sabrina.
Licia nods. At the NGO, they gave her a choice. After she had her babies, she could return, but she would lose her seniority and have to start all over. She is now working as a park guide two days a week, without a contract. “Nobody checks, and I need the work so badly, I accept it.”
What she didn’t accept was her treatment by the environmental nonprofit. She sued for €65,000, the additional amount she would have made if she’d had the correct contract in the first place. Wonder of wonders, they offered to settle for €35,000. The judge, a woman, commented tartly that if they were willing to pay that much, they were in effect admitting their guilt and by rights should pay the full sum. But in the end, to avoid further battle, Licia agreed to that amount plus her legal costs.
With two babies, the money was a godsend, but reinstatement in her former position was now out of the question.
“Still, we’re lucky. We have two bedrooms. We know people with children sleeping on the sofa. Or they’ve stopped eating meat. All these qualified people, barely making it to the end of the month. One of my friends has a doctorate in biology, but all she can find is work in a call center, for €1,000 a month. We’re like medieval serfs. We’re Italy’s new poor.”
In France, she says, they make it easier for parents, with state funding for day care and kindergarten. “In all of Rome, there are maybe three or four day-care centers. You’re really thinking of having kids?” she asks Sabrina.
“We’re talking about it.”
“Good luck. No one helps.” There is the “Berlusconi bonus”—a €1,000-per-baby government incentive to raise the birth rate. “It won’t even buy diapers. And now they’re cutting kindergarten to half-days, because the government needs to cut the education budget. Meanwhile, government funding gets siphoned to private Catholic schools so Berlusconi can get support from the Church.”
Licia’s father was one of fourteen children. She is one of four. Had she not been blessed with these adorable twins, her child would have been one of one. “I’m happy that we have these two. But it’s twice as hard for us.”
A generation ago, men and women married in their twenties. Women had babies earlier, and had more of them. Even so, family size had been dropping ever since the Industrial Revolution turned farming villages into manufacturing towns and women became part of the labor force. Today, being so well educated, they’re still hired as long as they’re single and childless, even as Italian men now live with their parents into their thirties, trying to save enough to get married. By the time they and their underpaid working girlfriends do so, there’s usually only time and money enough for one.
“Today,” says Licia, “a thirty-year-old is still a girl. I’m forty, and I’m just settling in to being a mother.”
Her friends are all leaving—for Germany, Australia, even Spain. There aren’t jobs there, either, but supposedly they do more to help women. Sabrina and Emilio have toyed with going somewhere, too. What a century: Italians aren’t having babies because it’s too expensive, or they flee Italy to have them somewhere else. Meanwhile, Italian schools are overfull, because immigrant children are taking the place of missing natives.
“If we have kids, what future will there be for them?” Sabrina asks. She and Emilio are having dinner in the home of their friends Claudia Giafaglione and Vincenzo Pipitone.
Claudia, who’s Sicilian, is serving grouper with couscous and a salted brioche stuffed with smoked salmon, ricotta, and chives. She has dark hair, round dark eyes, and a heart-shaped face, reminding Sabrina of a beautiful pet cat. She also has a degree in pharmacology and biology, and another in nutrition. Vincenzo, her tall, slim, handsome husband, is an army surgeon. They are more secure financially than most Italians their age—Claudia has just turned thirty-five—yet like Sabrina and Emilio, they are terrified by the idea of having children.
Emilio, whose latest app design is a guide to olive oil, translates his own fears into hard cash: “I earn about three thousand euros4 a month. We use contraception because we’re afraid we can’t afford kids. Yet suppose in ten years we have a bigger house, and can afford a better school. Ten years later, my pension will be about five hundred euros. So in twenty years I’ll be poor. If we wait ten years to have a baby, how will we afford to raise it?”
“I agree with Emilio,” Claudia says.
“This is stupid,” says Vincenzo. “When I go on military mission to Afghanistan, I see people as poor as animals. No electricity, no security. Yet they have families. Italy may be crazy, but at least we have peace here. We must be happier than they are. Yet we think so much about what we don’t have. The national sport in Italy is complaining.”
For a few minutes, they take turns at that sport, excoriating their beautiful, frustrating country that has so many ancient wonders—and ancient infrastructure to match. When Vincenzo was a medical student, he was assigned to a hospital forty-five kilometers from where he lived: without public transport, his commute was three hours.
“My brother never sees his daughters,” says Emilio. “They’re asleep when he leaves for work and asleep when he returns. He’s working so hard to send them out of Italy to study, meaning he’ll see them even less. But it’s the only way they can escape this economy that he’s sure won’t ever offer them decent jobs.”
“That’s so paranoid!” moans Sabrina. But it’s exactly what they fear for themselves, if they ever have the child they’re still too scared to have.
“We figure that by the time the kid is fourteen, he’ll already be out of the house, in England or China. Or India,” says Emilio glumly.
“It would be a strain for her to live here,” says Sabrina. “Nothing moves. We’re stuck in a past that we didn’t build. I just watched an edition of my show from ten years ago. We had the same guests on, talking about the same problems.”
But Claudia isn’t even thinking about Italy. She has far bigger worries.
“How can we even think of bringing children into this world anyway?” she asks.
Two days earlier, she went to the annual Rome Science Festival. This year’s theme was “The End of the World: A User’s Guide.” The opening session was a National Geographic Channel film titled Sovrappopolamento—“Overpopulation.” Its premise imagined 14 billion people—the United Nation’s high projection for 2084, should family-planning programs founder—trying to fit on the Earth. It showed Mexico City literally crumbling under its own weight, then pulled back to describe a planet that in 1930 had a comfortable population of 2 billion. Ever since, it’s been adding the equivalent of ten more New York Cities annually. The film then showed Asia rapidly doubling, interspersed with animations of entire cities suddenly collapsing. Apartment buildings two hundred stories tall went up, then came down—as did forests, flattened for more farmland. Bridges fell under the relentless tonnage of trucks hauling food. Grimy clouds from four new Chinese coal-fired plants each week fouled the air from London to Los Angeles. Shit gushed from overflowing Manhattan sewers, followed by rats bearing meningitis. Countries desperate to feed people slathered the land with chemicals.
Finally, after thirty-five years of bending under the burden of 14 billion-plus, famine wiped out 80 percent of humanity. Population stabilized at 4 billion. At the film’s end, ecosystems began to revive. Fish refilled the oceans. Greenery burst forth. People grew enough food, and birds sang anew.
When the lights came on, Claudia saw that several middle schools had brought classes to the science festival. She shuddered to imagine what these fourteen-year-old schoolkids would be thinking to see in an alleged documentary the world where they’d barely begun to live hell-bent for cataclysm within their own lifetimes.
“I’ll bet they find a solution before it gets that bad,” said a girl in a navy blue sweater and jeans as her class filed out. “Someone will invent something.”
“They’d alert us before something like that happens,” said the girl behind her, dressed identically except for her knee-high suede boots.
“I’m not having any kids,” said another in a purple scarf.
“If we all have to farm, you’ll need them,” a boy in a blue stocking cap interjected.
The girls exchanged alarmed glances at the prospect of having to farm.
“We are just too many!” says Claudia as she serves warm chocolate cake with a molten center. “We will be like a bacteria colony, living off our own wastes! How do we bring a child into this world of trouble, when we are destined to die?”
Vincenzo reaches for the wine, changes his mind, and produces a bottle of grappa from a cupboard.
It emerges that Claudia, appalled at Earth’s deteriorating ecosystem, is writing a spy romance set in the most polluted place in the world. She went to the science festival for ideas about settings: she’s considering the saline wasteland left by the now-vanished Aral Sea, the island of floating plastic spreading over the Pacific, or methane geysers in the melting Arctic.
“Maybe when you’re done writing about something so dark, you’ll be willing to think about a baby—” Vincenzo says, but stops when he sees her stricken look.
He lifts his glass of grappa. “Our future children,” he says, “who could live to see the end of the world.” He shakes his head, then downs it. Sabrina and Emilio stare at each other across the table.
For a long moment, all is silent. “Coffee?” Claudia finally says. Relieved, everyone laughs.
“I think Claudia and I are thinking too much,” says Vincenzo, standing behind her with his arms around her waist as their guests leave. She looks up at him with her round cat’s eyes.
Under the yellow streetlamps of the Lungotevere della Vittoria alongside the Tiber, Emilio and Sabrina walk to their car, holding hands. Later that year, the answer to whether or not to bring a child into a frightening century will be instantly clear to them, upon learning that Sabrina is pregnant—the answer being, Of course you do. A child is not just a child, but the future incarnate. Despair vanishes when there is truly something to hope for: a world for your child. You’ll do anything to assure there’ll be one. It may have colossal problems, but your baby is part of the solution, as will you be: there’s no more compelling reason to save the Earth than parents wanting to protect their offspring, one of whom may invent the miracle that changes all the odds.
Two months before she is to give birth, Sabrina leaves her job, packs up their apartment, and boards a British Airlines flight to London. Emilio has been there for nearly a year; she conceived when he came to see her on holiday. He is designing mobile apps for a thriving clothing company, and has already been promoted.
Sabrina is the newest immigrant to the UK. When their daughter, Anita, is born, should they remain four more years, she will be a British subject.