Childless society is 'sad and gray,' Pope tells Wednesday audience
March 18, 2015
“Children are a gift to humanity,” Pope Francis told his public audience on March 18, and a society with a plunging birth rate is “a sad and gray society because it is without children.”
In his series of weekly talks on the family, the Pope turned to the topic of children after having previously spoken on the roles of parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters.
Lamenting that many children are not welcomed, but destroyed in the womb, the Holy Father said that a society is judged by the way it treats its children. “The great gift of life is the first gift we have received,” he said. “Sometimes we risk forgetting this.”
The Pope devoted most of his talk to the ways in which children respond to God. “God has no difficulty in being understood by children, and children have no trouble understanding God,” he said. He remarked on the spontaneity of childhood, the pure trust in parents, and the complete absence of duplicity in the very young.
“Children also remind us that we are always children even when we become adults or if we become parents,” the Pope observed.
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