Italian journalist, in Vatican newspaper, rues demographic collapse
March 07, 2026
In a front-page op-ed in the Vatican newspaper, an award-winning Italian journalist lamented the demographic collapse in her native Milan since her childhood and linked it to a despair over the once self-evident proposition that “it is good that humanity exists.”
“I think of the residential neighborhoods of Milan on Sundays, deserted except for a few elderly people, alone or with a caregiver,” said Marina Corradi, who has written for secular and Catholic publications and now writes for Avvenire, the Italian bishops’ newspaper. “Not a child around. Downtown, yes, the crowds of tourists shopping. But here, no one.”
She recalled:
I remember the 1960s. I was very young, but the air I breathed was different. I think of the smell of bread from the bakeries at 8 in the morning, and the crowd of thousands of children entering my school. It was a large, massive, twentieth-century school, with wide staircases and large, bright classrooms. Built at the beginning of the century, evidently with the idea that it is good that humanity exists.
Perhaps in the 1960s, the memory of the war, alive in our parents, allowed us to still see the joy of a country at peace, where we could bring so many children into the world? What changed us? Excessive well-being? Peace itself, taken for granted for eighty years?
Legal abortion struck a stone on our consciences. Legal, eliminating a child. The law makes no difference whether that child is born or not. This idea has shaped us from within. The sacred, the mystery that confronts you with a child in the womb, repressed.
The trend “toward assisted suicide is obvious,” she continued. “For now, only for the terminally ill: but you’ll see, in time, the ability to demand death will extend to the depressed, the very elderly, those who are simply tired. Is it good for humanity to exist? Not for me, they will say, in ever greater numbers, demanding a new fundamental right.”
Corradi concluded:
If there is no longer a father, we are no one’s children, nor brothers among ourselves. Each of us governs himself autonomously. How wonderful the air was in the 1960s in Milan, when old people on the streets smiled at us children: happy that life, even though they had experienced pain and drama, continued within us. Certain that it is good that humanity exists.
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