While most countries in Europe seem to be giving in to a slow demographic decline, Hungary is fighting back with some of the world's most generous pronatalism policies—mostly thanks to pro-family PM, Viktor Orbán.
From Russian Insider:
The basis of Hungarian government today, says:
Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman… and the family as the basis of the nation’s survival. Hungary shall encourage the commitment to have children. The protection of families shall be regulated by a cardinal Act.
Since 2010, when Prime Minister Orbán’s government took office, Hungary’s demographic policy has shown real results: by 2017, abortion numbers had dropped by more than a third, from 40,449 to 28,500, divorces saw a marked decline (from 23,873 in 2010 to 18,600 in 2017), and the number of marriages had risen by some 42 percent.
The government is seeking to find out, inter alia, whether the people agree that the problem of Hungary’s declining population should not be remedied with immigration, but with more intensive family support measures; whether the people agree that the new family support programmes will continue to remain tied to employment; and whether young married couples should be given support with the initial phases of their independent married lives.
Alarmingly fertility remains below replacement level but perhaps -- most likely in fact -- the full effect of the reform will take more time and full benefits will be reaped only after years or decades more.
REMNANT COMMENT: The pro-family winds of change are certainly blowing across Europe, now that the nation-killing consequences of International Planned Parenthood's agenda have been fully realized.
Now, wouldn't it be great if the neo-Catholic establishment would experience a similar awakening and begin to reexamine its long-standing fixation on natural planned parenthood—so-called NFP?
Yes, I realize that Natural Family Planning isn't intrinsically evil as is, say, artificial contraception. But, nevertheless, when you have the entire Church of Accompaniment orchestrating a world-wide push to curb fertility in Catholic families that are otherwise open to life, you’ve got to wonder whose side they're really on, especially now with Pope Francis teaming up with Jeffrey Sachs and the whole "sustainable development" crowd.
If we’re brutally honest with ourselves, we've got to admit that diocesan training programs mandating every young Catholic couple be thoroughly indoctrinated in the art of preventing conception with machine-like precision is, at the end of the day, a bit suspicious. At the very least we've got to admit that it runs the risk of encouraging our own little Catholic contraceptive mentality. Right? I mean, how could it not?
If I can get personal for a moment, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only man who is grateful no NFP experts got into his head back when he was young, foolish and newlywed. If someone had told me to wait until I was ready, mature and financially stable before becoming a "responsible parent", I’d likely still be coming up with excuses.
As it was, when my wife and I were married in 1996 our first child showed up nine months later. A couple years after that, we had three under three. And, by the way, we didn’t have two pennies to rub together at the time. Somehow, God provided.
And we weren’t heroes. That’s just the way it was. When I was a kid, every family in our neighborhood had 9, 10, 12 children. Catholic couples were literally wide open to life, with the mentality being "however many children God sends us is how many children we'll have." I had eight siblings. Growing up was so much fun that it never even occurred to me to deprive my own kids of that truly awesome childhood.
Not so much anymore, right?
So, what happened? Somewhere along the line Catholics got it into their heads that less is more, that “responsible parenthood” means a larger house, more reliable cars and much smaller families.
In most dioceses in America today, for example, the mandatory pre-Cana classes include expert instruction on how to delay conception i.e., how to take advantage of the pleasure of the marital act without necessarily dealing with the drooling, pooping, crying little consequences. Having already equalized the ends of marriage, they've come pretty close to inverting them, arguing that the unitive (and concupiscence-controlling) ends of marriage trump procreation and the education of children.
In fairness, it must also be said that many couples use NFP to conceive when there is some difficulty in that regard. And for this reason, a blanket condemnation of NFP is absurd. It certainly has its place.
The trouble is, many Catholic couples use NFP, not out of some necessity but, rather, indefinitely and merely to ensure they have only a couple of kids. And the real heartbreak of this is that we're talking about the "good guys" here. These are the cream-of-the-crop Catholics who've kept the Faith enough to want to live in compliance with the Church's moral laws that, if rarely stressed from the pulpits, are nevertheless still in the books. They’re conscientious Catholics, in other words, who've been sort of brainwashed by the Church of Accompaniment into embracing a de facto contraceptive mentality.
If the over-zealous champions of NFP were to instead encourage Catholic couples to have "as many children as God sends" once again, we'd no doubt see a significant increase in the pre-conciliar large Catholic family about which Pope Pius XII wrote so beautifully and which once made up the backbone of the Catholic Church as self-reliant, self-sufficient, enemies of the nanny state.
I know, mine is a pipe dream. Too much water has gone under the bridge to walk this one back. Still, it's true that most Latin Mass-going traditional Catholics haven’t paid much attention to NFP over the past twenty-five years, preferring instead to just have a bunch of kids and live their lives without the "romance" of charts, graphs and thermometers.
Maybe now that Francis has ripped the mask of innocence off the Revolution of Vatican II as a whole--and more and more neo-Catholics are coming to realize they've been had (liturgically and doctrinally)—maybe now is a good time to charitably and gently put the topic of "Catholic contraception" back on the table.
Long live the large pre-conciliar Catholic family!
