The Catholic Fertility Crisis： Do They Only Have Two Generations Left？!
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Summary
In this episode, we re looking at the alarming decline in fertility rates among Catholics, and why it s worse than most people think. We re asking the question: How bad is the problem, and what can we do to fix it?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Needed fertility is the fertility rate that you would need to have to stay stable as a cultural group when you account for the percentage of people who deconvert from your religion per generation.
00:00:10.960
On the other hand, Catholic churches will see appreciable decline.
00:00:15.120
He says that they have 1.9 children, but these don't separate out the Hispanic Catholic population.
00:00:20.120
The TFR for non-Hispanic white Catholic women in the United States is 1.64.
00:00:25.600
Anyway, so he thinks it's 1.9, which it really isn't.
00:00:27.780
Children born per woman is nowhere near enough to offset the rate of conversion out of these faiths, yielding a needed fertility rate for Roman Catholics of 3.1.
00:00:38.360
Therefore, these churches, and this is with the inflated 1.9 number that's including the Hispanic population, a 40% decline in the next generation.
00:00:48.200
Catholics' view that life begins at conception, the problem with this view is that by the statistics, it doesn't really appear to impact the rate that Catholics use contraception or get abortions very highly.
00:01:08.840
So they must be doing it like way more than Catholics, right?
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It's just going to be like, oh, and it gets worse.
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We just learned that Catholics have abortions at rates similar to those who are not Catholic.
00:01:28.680
They're thinking, okay, but this is just lumping all Catholics into one group.
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What if we divide Catholics by how religious they are?
00:01:38.160
Simone, before we go further, I got more stats for you here.
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Every stat here is, this situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined.
00:01:55.140
And I am excited to be talking to you today, Simone, because this is going to be an episode
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our fans are going to love because the stat-heavy fertility episodes always do spectacular.
00:02:11.220
So I have mentioned before that Catholics have a lower fertility rate than non-Catholics
00:02:21.140
And that Catholic countries seem to be hit by fertility collapse a lot faster and harder
00:02:28.220
For example, the average European Catholic majority country has a fertility rate of only
00:02:33.480
And then you have the rapid declines in fertility across Latin America with examples like Uruguay
00:02:39.840
in just the past seven years going from an above replacement fertility rate to only around
00:02:44.700
Argentina, if you're looking at the four-year-olds who are entering kindergarten this year, there
00:02:49.620
is going to be 30% less than just four years ago.
00:02:53.060
You look at Costa Rica where a local demographer used the term vertiginous to describe their
00:02:57.980
fertility situation and local women have below one fertility right now.
00:03:06.360
But what has always been said to me is for whatever reason, this is not true of American
00:03:15.800
I had taken it as a fact because so many people had told me this.
00:03:25.140
Of the pronatalist movement, there are a number of Catholic thought leaders in the movement.
00:03:32.340
But, and I will also note, of the pronatalist Catholics that I know of, they fall into two
00:03:38.420
They are either weirdly unmarried and childless younger people, or married with a lot of kids,
00:03:47.800
But the unique thing about the Catholics in the pronatalist movement is that when they
00:03:51.620
are younger, they are much more likely to be unmarried.
00:03:55.460
Now, I'll get to this because this actually is what the statistics would suggest we would
00:04:07.480
The very first result is the AI review of the literature, which says in 2023, the total
00:04:14.520
fertility rate for Catholics in the United States was just over 1.6.
00:04:19.300
But then I go down and I find a study that looks into this, right?
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So the TFR for non-Hispanic white Catholic women in the United States is 1.64.
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Because I haven't seen in any instance, there have been tiny improvements, but not any crazy
00:04:52.680
So we can't expect it to have gone up significantly.
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And it is much lower than the Protestant fertility rate.
00:04:58.700
In the same study, the average Protestant fertility rate was 1.91.
00:05:04.960
Now, if these numbers are correct, it means the average Catholic fertility rate in the United
00:05:09.120
States is below the average fertility rate in the United States.
00:05:19.800
Maybe it's being all set by these ultra-religious Catholics that we're hearing about.
00:05:23.880
Because I keep hearing about these hypothetical ultra-pro-family, ultra-religious Catholics.
00:05:28.960
And the stats are basically show that they don't...
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One is an article actually written by a Catholic, for Catholics, the alarming fertility decline
00:05:45.160
What we're seeing right now, and I'm going to read some quotes here from the study that
00:05:50.100
was looking at this, that they say, this contrast was the pattern during the baby boom era where
00:05:54.840
Catholics had a higher fertility than Protestants.
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The authors state that, quote, the baby boom era pattern of high Catholic and low Protestant
00:06:07.220
And this is where it gets interesting because the studies have actually looked at this.
00:06:10.680
Most of the Protestant-Catholic difference in fertility is related to Catholics marrying
00:06:16.780
later and less frequently compared to Protestants.
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When looking at currently married women, the difference in fertility between Catholics and Protestants
00:06:25.660
was smaller, indicating later and less frequent marriage among Catholics that's a key factor.
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The marital fertility of white Catholic wives was still higher than that of non-Catholic
00:06:40.700
But this difference has disappeared when Hispanics were excluded from the Catholic group.
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Once Catholics are married, they have the same fertility rate as other Americans.
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Not a higher fertility rate, but about the same as other religious Americans.
00:07:03.920
Let's look at the Catholic influencers that I know about.
00:07:06.680
Nick Fuentes talks all the time about American fertility rates, and he's still unmarried.
00:07:22.100
You're like, sometimes people just unsubscribed.
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I'm like, she must have been thinking something when she just did that.
00:07:28.560
I wish she could find a husband, but she hasn't found a husband.
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And then I think more broadly at the young Catholics I know in the prenatalist movement,
00:07:39.460
When it is actually fairly rare to see unmarried people from other groups.
00:07:44.160
They might be struggling to have a kid, but just completely unmarried?
00:07:47.180
Yeah, so first I want to see if you have some thoughts here, because the stats will keep
00:07:53.880
Yeah, my first intuition, and I wonder if this is maybe at play, is that more Protestant
00:08:00.900
church communities in the United States have stronger overall community and town social
00:08:06.120
networks, meaning people are more likely to find partners.
00:08:09.400
Whereas I don't really think about Catholic towns, where you would really see a religiously
00:08:14.880
affiliated dating market, the same way you would with, I can think of cities and towns
00:08:20.600
that are very Baptist or very evangelical, and you can end up with a very strong church
00:08:25.360
community there, certainly very Mormon, et cetera.
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Consider that a lot of the Catholics, so you're thinking Catholics, but a lot of the Catholics
00:08:38.140
come from minority immigrant communities, like Irish and Italian Americans.
00:08:42.840
And if you think about the Irish-Catholic, it's because you're thinking Catholic broadly
00:08:47.880
instead of about what Catholic communities actually are, which is often ethno-national
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Like the old mafia families is probably what you should be thinking more of instead of this
00:08:59.180
modern idea of what a Catholic is to a Protestant.
00:09:07.480
Now, before I give my hypotheses, I'm going to throw out some more stats here that will further
00:09:11.560
scare anyone who is concerned about Catholics continuing to exist.
00:09:18.560
Likewise, Pentecostal churches will grow with an actual fertility of 2.1, substantially above
00:09:28.200
Needed fertility is the fertility rate that you would need to have to stay stable as a cultural
00:09:33.460
group when you account for the bleed that your cultural group has, i.e. the percentage
00:09:38.200
of people who deconvert from your religion per generation.
00:09:41.420
On the other hand, Catholic and Orthodox churches will see appreciable decline.
00:09:46.280
He says that they have 1.9 children in both, but the 1.9 studies are the ones that don't
00:09:53.960
I will note here about the Hispanic Catholic population.
00:09:58.960
Because their fertility rate is declining rapidly.
00:10:04.300
It's declining much faster than just about any other fertility rate out there right now.
00:10:08.440
So it's certainly not going to contribute to the higher Catholic fertility rate in a
00:10:12.780
When I say higher, I mean, it's a lower fertility rate than you would expect, but it's bolstering
00:10:16.380
the Catholic fertility rate in the United States in some studies, way above that 1.6 number.
00:10:21.100
And the second is that culturally, they're a very different group.
00:10:24.780
The Irish and Italian Catholic cultural groups are just, while they're like superficially
00:10:31.320
the same religion as the Hispanic cultural group, the way that they, as somebody who's
00:10:35.940
lived, like we live a lot in Hispanic majority countries, like we used to split our time between
00:10:40.620
Miami and Lima in terms of where we were living.
00:10:45.280
So we've also been around a lot of like Irish communities.
00:10:55.900
Children born per woman is nowhere near enough to offset the rate of conversion out of these
00:10:59.700
faiths, yielding a needed fertility rate for Roman Catholics of 3.1.
00:11:06.140
Therefore, these churches, and this is with the inflated 1.9 number that's including the
00:11:19.100
Well, especially, and here's the thing too, they're extra screwed if they're getting
00:11:23.500
married later because then they're starting their fertility journey later and they don't
00:11:31.340
So a lot of this is, I think, actually downstream of the abortion stuff.
00:11:40.240
The problem with this view is that by the statistics, and we will go over the statistics
00:11:46.120
here, it doesn't really appear to impact the rate that Catholics use contraception or get
00:11:55.140
So Catholics in surveys are reporting that they're getting abortions at rates similar
00:12:06.060
Finally, a bit of even more disturbing news for Orthodox Catholics.
00:12:09.520
First, as shown in figure eight, the percentages of Catholic women using so-called morning-after
00:12:15.560
Among those who have ever had sexual intercourse, 25% have.
00:12:19.160
32% among never-married women ages 15 to 44 have.
00:12:25.260
So if you look here and you look at the percent who have used morning-after pills, for example,
00:12:31.480
of Catholics, for the overall, it's 25% for the never-married at 32%.
00:12:37.140
Now, contrast this with evangelical Protestants, where for the never-married, it's only 20%,
00:12:44.100
Or you can go for Black Protestants, 20%, 21% respectively.
00:12:56.260
So let's, now, the mainline Protestants do it slightly more than Catholics.
00:13:00.460
So remember, for Catholics overall, it was 25%.
00:13:06.660
And so these, but okay, let's go for non-religious affiliation.
00:13:10.560
So they must be doing it, like, way more than Catholics, right?
00:13:17.700
For the non-married women group, keep in mind, in Catholics, that 32% who have done it,
00:13:27.320
We're going to go into even more chilling statistics for Catholics out there.
00:13:32.540
Figure nine shows the percentages of women who have ever been pregnant who admitted to having
00:13:57.980
Now, if we go to mainline Protestants, okay, these people are, like, not very religious
00:14:05.060
It was 13% overall for Catholics, 16% for the mainline Protestants, and then for the never
00:14:10.480
married group, 26% when contrasted with the Catholic, 20%.
00:14:13.180
Now, if you look at the no religious affiliation at all here, you actually get a slightly bigger
00:14:17.660
boost with it being 28% and 33% respectively, but still not as big as you would expect.
00:14:29.320
It's a lot more people getting abortions than I would expect as well.
00:14:34.200
Apparently, birth control is not as widely used as I thought, which surprises me because
00:14:38.680
I was not sexually active before I met you, and yet I had been on birth control for years
00:14:47.620
It's just bizarre to me that so few women are on it.
00:14:53.560
It's just going to be like a, oh, and it gets worse.
00:14:57.820
We just learned that Catholics have abortions at rates similar to those who are not Catholic.
00:15:02.760
So now we're getting into the next issue, which is, in fact, the...
00:15:07.600
I'm quoting from the article where these come from.
00:15:09.000
In fact, the National Academy of Sciences estimates that at least at earlier versions of
00:15:13.340
the NSFG, that's this study right here, up to half or more of all abortion
00:15:19.600
This type of survey error is called selective recall bias.
00:15:23.480
So basically, if you have a strong religious reason to not recall something in a survey,
00:15:29.160
What you're saying is a lot of Catholic women who filled this out and said they did not
00:15:34.600
Have, based on other surveys that have been done.
00:15:40.580
Now we're going to look at another thing here because I know what people are thinking.
00:15:44.200
They're thinking, okay, but this is just lumping all Catholics into one group.
00:15:49.440
What if we divide Catholics by how religious they are?
00:15:53.900
And I have done that here and it doesn't solve the problem.
00:15:58.220
Right here, we are dividing them by church attendance.
00:16:01.300
We have a once a month group, a one to three times a month group, and a weekly group.
00:16:08.300
So less than once a month is the first, one to three times weekly.
00:16:11.180
This is the ever-married, ever-used artificial birth control of any type.
00:16:19.880
So of the people who don't go to church or go to church less than once a month, Catholics,
00:16:26.600
Okay, what about the people who go one to three times a month?
00:16:30.580
Okay, what about the people who go weekly, the really devout ones?
00:16:34.760
This is so odd because we meet so many Catholic and otherwise harder-aligned Protestant people
00:16:41.160
who will not shut up about birth control being so unnatural and bad, and yet it's so pervasively used.
00:16:50.480
I guess that's why they're going on about it, but this really surprises me.
00:16:58.040
But also, if that many of them are using birth control, are also that many of them so unconscientious
00:17:02.700
that they don't use it enough to need actually to use the morning after an abortion?
00:17:09.640
Let's say of the Catholics who were married and ever used birth control that does not include
00:17:15.880
condoms or vasectomies, i.e. plan B in abortions, et cetera, the pill, et cetera, okay?
00:17:22.480
Of the group that goes less than once a month, it's 94%.
00:17:25.280
Of the group that goes three to four times a month, it's 88%.
00:17:32.660
So the restrictions are just not that effective within the community.
00:17:38.880
So if we're talking about abortions here, the difference between the groups is 24%.
00:17:45.200
One in four Catholics who goes to a church less than once a month has had an abortion.
00:17:52.320
Wouldn't that just be also mentally tough to go to a church that has such views?
00:17:58.040
I guess it helps that you can confess, but still.
00:18:03.920
And then these very religious Catholics that go weekly, okay, weekly plus, 11%.
00:18:11.340
Over one in 10 Catholics who is going to a church very frequently.
00:18:15.680
If you have a group of 10 Catholics, one of them are Catholic women.
00:18:22.480
What this really says to me is that our message around cultural sovereignty and reproductive choice
00:18:30.400
really matters in that you should focus in on your own group.
00:18:36.580
If you believe abortion is bad, try to get your own group to ban abortion internally.
00:18:46.580
But Simone, before we go further, I got more stats for you here.
00:18:53.100
Every stat here is this situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined.
00:18:57.340
So the next one is, so some Catholics might be watching this and they're like, yeah,
00:19:03.180
but I know a number of Catholics who attend church weekly and are still not very religious.
00:19:10.460
So what if instead we separated Catholics by how religious they are between very, somewhat, and not?
00:19:23.060
Ever used artificial birth control of any type?
00:19:25.720
A hundred percent of the non-religious ones, not surprising, but of the somewhat religious ones, it's 99%.
00:19:34.660
If you're talking about had an abortion, of the not religious ones, it was 27%.
00:19:40.740
But of the very religious ones, it was whopping 18% of Catholics.
00:19:45.780
Of the ones who are married and used artificial birth control other than condom and vasectomies, i.e. morning after pill, the pill, et cetera, or abortions themselves.
00:19:54.760
You are looking between 96% of the not very religious ones to 94% of the somewhat religious ones and 82% of the very religious ones.
00:20:05.440
And as a quick but related aside, it is important to remember that if you overlay a heat map of how restrictive abortion access is across the EU,
00:20:16.340
it is going to directly overlap with a heat map of how low fertility rates are across the EU.
00:20:23.340
There appears to be a direct link between how restrictive a culture is around abortion and how low its fertility rate is.
00:20:32.440
So the issue is that Catholics aren't Catholic-ing.
00:20:38.800
Because they are Catholic-ing when it comes to things like IVF.
00:20:43.540
Like when I say I'm afraid of Catholics going extinct, I very sincerely mean that.
00:20:48.160
When we have studies showing us that by 2060, 50% of men in the developed world are not going to be fertile anymore.
00:20:55.680
And then you get the, and so if they ban IVF, they're banning 50% of their population from having kids.
00:21:01.520
And they already have terrible fertility rates.
00:21:06.780
This is where it gets really tragic and sad to me.
00:21:09.820
So people on our show, they'll know we talk about like high and low Muslim culture.
00:21:14.000
There is absolutely an iteration of Muslim culture that goes out and defaces things in museums and attempts to start a caliphate.
00:21:23.680
And basically are barbarians, like in terms of their level, the way that they treat people within their culture and outside of the culture, the way they view outsiders.
00:21:32.660
But then there's a side of Muslim culture, which is where the Muslim Golden Age did.
00:21:35.860
And like all of our Muslim scientists come from.
00:21:38.020
And I have a number of Muslim friends who are very enlightened, philosophically engaged people.
00:21:44.140
Like within every culture, you get to choose the high road or the low road, right?
00:21:54.020
It has its Thomas Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo.
00:22:01.600
The mad Pope Pius the Knights, who wrote the syllabus of errors, basically calling for a Catholic caliphate.
00:22:08.020
For people who aren't familiar with the syllabus of errors, I can read some stuff on it so people know.
00:22:12.940
The syllabus of errors called for people who lived in Catholic majority countries to remove freedom of religion and freedom of press within their countries and create Catholic states.
00:22:24.140
Moreover, it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship and the full power given to all overtly and publicly manifested any opinion whatsoever and thoughts conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and the minds of people
00:22:40.040
And then you can look at other quotes where like one of the things that should be banned or ideas that should be banned in the syllabus of errors is every man is free to embrace and profess that religion, which guided by the light of reasons he shall consider true.
00:22:52.560
Another one is in the present day, it is no longer expedient.
00:22:55.620
The Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the state to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.
00:23:05.340
But he is also the Pope who ordered the great castration.
00:23:09.160
The going out and ripping the penises off of statues made by cultures.
00:23:15.000
It was so much like higher than his own that he personally could not even see the worthiness of this art, just like this level of cultural depravity.
00:23:28.500
It turns out that the only reason that Catholics today think that life began at conception is because of the mad Pope Pius IX, the great castration guy, the syllabus of errors guy.
00:23:43.880
They thought life began 30 to 90 days after the fetus began developing.
00:23:51.680
So you're really getting this option with Catholicism, which is culturally, where do Catholics go?
00:23:57.540
Do they go back to their great figures in their history and try to revitalize a true older form of Catholicism?
00:24:04.580
Or do they go with the guy who went around ripping penises off statues, an act that to me seems not particularly different from the Muslims who are defacing things in their museums because they see them as an affront to their religion.
00:24:19.680
And Protestants have gone through dark periods like this as well, where they've defaced things.
00:24:23.180
I've got to admit, Protestants went through lots of great art and just defaced it.
00:24:27.340
Because as much as I'm against mythology, I do not believe it.
00:24:29.220
So many Catholic church interiors that used to have priceless art.
00:24:32.520
Yeah, so every culture has a high road and a low road.
00:24:37.020
It's which iteration of that culture do you decide that you want to follow?
00:24:40.900
So I think that's one thing that we have to note here, right?
00:24:43.280
Is if you're going to get married later, you got this issue.
00:24:46.680
I've got some more stats here to go over really quickly.
00:24:49.260
Or here, what we're going to do is we are going to put a silver lining on this potentially, okay?
00:25:00.180
Some other stats that we didn't get a chance to mention.
00:25:02.520
Among ever-married Catholic women aged 35 to 44, the percentage having five or more
00:25:06.500
live births dropped more than six times between 1976 and the most recent data, sixfold.
00:25:17.120
The problem is I haven't been able to find this broken out by religion, so I don't know.
00:25:21.340
What is also really interesting in these statistics that I'll put on screen here is that while more
00:25:26.960
devout people have more kids, the number of kids that non-devout people plan on having when
00:25:32.160
they are 18 to 24 actually isn't that much lower than the number that devout people plan
00:25:39.360
It's just the actual realized fertility potential is much higher for the devout people.
00:25:45.300
They're just, and the expectation among the other group just goes down and converges with
00:25:49.220
the number of kids they actually end up having as time goes on.
00:25:53.340
So that's a little bit of a, maybe there's a way out of this, but now we need to talk about
00:25:57.820
why are Catholics marrying later than other groups?
00:26:01.600
And this is something I can only speculate on, but here is my thought.
00:26:08.760
And of course I have to go into some stereotyping about the Catholics I know.
00:26:12.800
Catholics are typically, in my experience, much more intellectually heady and things need
00:26:20.620
to be technically correct in terms of how they approach life and much less, I guess I'd
00:26:26.600
call it like passionful in the way that they approach things.
00:26:32.220
Very nerdy, but in a type of nerdy that's very divergent with our type of nerdy.
00:26:36.740
Our type of nerdy is very much let's head for the truth and look at the statistics and find
00:26:44.340
Whereas the Catholic nerdy is let's go through the ancient literature and the great thinkers
00:26:49.260
and everyone, a genius who has written on this subject.
00:26:52.540
I think you need both of these working next to each other in an ecosystem to produce great
00:26:57.380
But consider finding a wife with these two hats on or finding a husband with these two
00:27:04.140
You're going to be much more interested in the particulars of an individual rather than
00:27:09.940
just making it work if you're approaching it with this heady perspective.
00:27:14.740
Whereas if you're approaching it with this, you just have to make things work.
00:27:18.620
And to an extent, like even though we try to quarantine our emotions as much as possible,
00:27:24.700
I would still say there's much more emotional leak into our actions, which may be leading
00:27:31.100
us to sublimate this basically checklist mentality a bit more than Catholics do.
00:27:41.540
It might be that historically, because we do know that historically, as I mentioned in
00:27:45.520
all of these studies, pre-70s Catholics really did have a higher fertility rate and they got
00:27:49.980
this higher fertility rate by their perspectives on contraception, which did genuinely increase
00:27:56.800
It might be that the Catholic cultural group was basically able to cheese their fertility
00:28:01.700
rate for a long time and not develop other mechanisms to motivate people to find partners
00:28:06.460
and have kids because they had the boost from their bans on contraception.
00:28:11.460
And when those bans stopped being effective anymore, then they didn't have the rest of
00:28:17.280
the cultural technology that motivated kids for the sake of kids instead of because you're
00:28:25.480
And so there's all of this talk around, and you see this within Catholic communities, like
00:28:30.700
this elevation of life and children as being these great, glorious things.
00:28:36.920
However, I feel like the way the Catholic community intellectually relates to these concepts
00:28:46.360
I think it's the same way that they relate to marriage, for example.
00:28:49.620
How much does Nick Fuentes opine on the type of person you need to be to get a good partner?
00:28:55.720
Now, if you're approaching information like a Simone or Malcolm, I would immediately discount
00:29:00.420
anything he says about the way a married couple should live their lives because he, or the
00:29:05.780
way you should go about securing a partner because whatever he's doing clearly isn't working.
00:29:09.940
But a Catholic, like the way that Catholics intellectually relate to information, might actually take
00:29:14.840
advice on how to find a partner from somebody like him because he aesthetically is giving views
00:29:23.860
that align with great thinkers in history who they have respect for, even if functionally
00:29:29.500
him following those perspectives has shown to not work within our modern context.
00:29:37.760
There does seem to be a risk with Catholicism of becoming so divorced from, we'll say, like
00:29:46.160
the source material and instead looking at experts who analyze experts and eventually become
00:29:54.600
But I can't see a direct line between that and fertility rates.
00:29:58.660
I just, I think it's telling one that there clearly is a lot of, we'll say, functional
00:30:12.040
Like they may, you might say that you're Catholic, but the urban monoculture is driving more of your
00:30:17.620
behavior, if not your thoughts than you would like, or in practice.
00:30:21.040
And then I do think that there's something going on with community formation.
00:30:28.080
Most of the community amenities, services, even missionary work that I've encountered in my life.
00:30:35.880
And of course, this is anecdotal, so it's not great information, but it hasn't been Catholic.
00:30:45.340
If I don't see missionary work, if I don't see soup kitchens, if I don't see charities, if I don't see
00:30:49.220
auctions, if I don't see events, then I'm probably also not encountering a community that is providing
00:30:56.580
And keep in mind that people often meet each other at these things as well.
00:31:02.040
So it could be that the Catholic church has so much dedicated to its own.
00:31:06.680
I've actually never been Protestantized to by a Catholic.
00:31:10.780
And it could be a structural issue because, for example, most Protestant groups are not
00:31:16.060
really oriented around a large, sprawling church.
00:31:19.480
The attention goes more to mission-oriented things or local community events and programming.
00:31:24.080
Whereas because the Catholic church has orders of priests and nuns and payroll and staff
00:31:30.000
and bureaucracy and internal processes, it could be that it's developed a form of governing
00:31:41.400
It would otherwise go toward community programming, like mission work, like community services, like
00:31:49.060
Now that's instead going to training priests and maintaining orders of nuns and maintaining
00:31:54.080
the internal apparatus of Vatican City, et cetera.
00:31:57.940
I have two other ideas I've come up while you've been talking here.
00:32:01.160
One idea is the aesthetic idealism of Catholics is what is causing them to get married later.
00:32:08.020
So when I talk about the aesthetic idealism of Catholics, I don't even, do I need to explain
00:32:12.700
Do you know what I'm talking about when I say Catholics are aesthetic idealists?
00:32:15.120
Like they really like this grandeur feeling, this everything is like, this is the way you
00:32:19.840
do a marriage for it to be just and good, right?
00:32:23.060
This is the way you live your life for it to be just and good.
00:32:26.880
And it's an aesthetic direction of perfection and grace and beauty.
00:32:33.240
And there is, you know, obviously there's something motivating about this, but it's pretty bad at
00:32:37.720
feeling the deal with specific other individuals because it's very easy for someone to not meet
00:32:50.580
Next, what if it is downstream of the priest class being celibate?
00:32:58.660
Because you're talking about this giant bureaucracy that the Catholics have.
00:33:02.400
And one unique thing about the Catholic bureaucracy that is often acting as their dating coaches and life
00:33:09.320
coaches and psychologists, like when it's functioning correctly, right?
00:33:17.120
Oh, and so these, yeah, basically the tribal elders of the Catholic community are not speaking
00:33:22.360
from experience when helping people form relationships or that is to say romantic sexual relationships
00:33:28.300
or get married or find a partner because they themselves did not successfully do that.
00:33:35.380
Contrast like a young Jew or a young Mormon, right?
00:33:38.000
I go to my rabbi and I talk about dating problems or finding a wife or something like that.
00:33:50.940
Yeah, they're going to probably have a family and a ton of kids.
00:33:53.200
They're going to be able to talk from a position of not sympathy, but empathy.
00:33:58.680
Empathy is when you're talking about an emotion that you've had before and you can put yourself
00:34:01.580
in their shoes through mirroring the emotion through when you've had sympathy.
00:34:04.580
It's when you can imagine what it's like to be them, but you haven't actually experienced
00:34:13.320
It's sympathy is one and empathy is the same word.
00:34:16.040
Simone is the smarter one and you're proving it again right here.
00:34:23.800
I won't even check it when I'm doing editing and then...
00:34:29.300
If the influencers of your space are giving advice, it's going to get...
00:34:34.760
Our general rule of thumb is the advice that you take from someone is advice that's going
00:34:39.960
And if you're getting advice on relationships from a celibate person who works in a bureaucracy,
00:34:46.380
So then consider, like we've got to flip this, consider how this is actually protective of
00:34:53.520
the aesthetic idealism problem I was talking about.
00:34:56.680
So when you go to a rabbi that's actually had to deal with being married to someone and
00:35:02.480
finding a spouse, and you're like, look, they don't live up to my ideal of what a woman
00:35:08.320
They're going to be like, buddy, it's like that for everyone.
00:35:13.160
You'll go to the Catholic priest because they've never actually had to deal with these compromises
00:35:18.760
They are much less likely to be compromising on those aesthetic...
00:35:30.100
She's comparing your potential husband to Jesus.
00:35:34.340
And then you've got to keep in mind that as a Catholic, and this is another huge problem
00:35:38.120
that Catholics have, because of the priesthood, is typically your most devout members, okay?
00:35:45.160
Your fanatics are the people who in a normal religion are pumping out the most kids.
00:35:50.820
In Catholicism, you're mimetically castrating them.
00:35:53.720
Your most devout members are entering the priesthood.
00:35:58.600
That is how they serve their duty to God rather than by having kids.
00:36:02.840
So, if I would make a few prescriptive changes for Catholicism, one is the celibate priesthood
00:36:13.040
It's definitely not in the Bible that your priest should be celibate.
00:36:18.580
It was made up with good reason, I think, when it was first made up to prevent nepotism
00:36:22.600
within church institutions, great reason to do it initially.
00:36:28.820
Two, this life begins at conception thing during the greatest periods, when your church was
00:36:33.380
still this living entity that was producing all these amazing and great thinkers that
00:36:38.280
I look to respect and that I draw religious authority from.
00:36:42.140
Even as a non-Catholic, I can go to the writings of someone like Thomas Aquinas and feel like getting
00:36:48.060
information from somebody who is genuinely touched by God in his writings, and these have
00:36:57.020
Whereas, when I look at more modern Catholic writings, they read like research abstracts.
00:37:03.680
Like, it's the difference between a living and a dead religion, right?
00:37:07.780
And to bring a religion back to life, you have to bring the theological conversation back
00:37:13.940
to life, which means you need to be having a living conversation about the theology.
00:37:18.900
It's that the conversation about the Catholic theology needs to become more of a living thing
00:37:24.840
in the way it is within Protestant communities.
00:37:27.220
If you look at like the pre-millennialist versus the post-millennialist Protestants, and you
00:37:31.320
look at them debating, this is a living conversation.
00:37:33.880
Even if it's like nuanced stuff, they are passionate about this.
00:37:37.600
I don't see this because I watch a lot of like religious communities talking to each other.
00:37:41.460
With the Catholic religious authorities, it always feels more like an academic debate.
00:37:46.320
And so it's, how can you bring that passion back in?
00:37:49.340
I think it's by doubling down on the aestheticism, but the aestheticism of the old and the aesthetic,
00:37:54.960
not aestheticism, like being an aesthetic, but the aesthetic drive or morality.
00:38:00.060
I think you can maintain that because I think that's key to Catholic culture, but to aim
00:38:05.380
for the early church instead of the modern church.
00:38:08.800
Which should take you closer to the true church.
00:38:11.600
Any organization that grows over time is going to drift a little bit.
00:38:18.640
So to aim for the early church, restructure around that, and to, what would be the second
00:38:25.140
I just don't know how you can fix this issue when your entire ruling bureaucracy has never
00:38:31.700
In a world where the difficulty of finding a spouse has become astronomically harder, you're
00:38:39.740
He's an old guy, so he's out of touch was what the modern dating market is.
00:38:43.040
But at least he has like some connection to it.
00:38:45.900
Like at least eventually somebody's going to be in that position who has dealt with something
00:38:50.480
like a modern dating market, that will just never happen with the Catholic community.
00:38:55.160
So there is not the same mandate to update their perspectives.
00:38:59.800
And you even have the Pope now calling for people.
00:39:01.900
There was a quote recently that like women need to have more kids and they're shirking
00:39:08.780
And I wish there were something more productive to say aside from, I still think the big thing
00:39:15.980
is when people look at falling birth rates and they think that the solution is to impose
00:39:20.840
one cultural solution on everyone, I don't think that's the right answer.
00:39:24.620
And I think cultures really need to look within and solve their own problems before doing things
00:39:29.160
like trying to universally ban abortion, which is only causing things to become harder for Catholics
00:39:36.200
in many ways, because now a bunch of people are pushing back where they wouldn't otherwise
00:39:40.680
So yeah, I also feel like a lot of people may be stepping away from the Catholic church
00:39:46.260
because of these developments, which is only going to hurt them more.
00:39:50.240
And the bands aren't even really affecting abortion rates within your own community.
00:39:53.560
Like instead of focusing on this deontological and like ethical structure to build relations.
00:40:00.520
And if people want to hear more of our Catholic abortion debate, you can go to our video,
00:40:04.260
Who's Actually Killing More Kids, Us Are Catholics, where we go into that question
00:40:11.080
For me, I think the sign that God does not, did not intend us to believe that life begins
00:40:15.540
at conception and meant for us to know this is really clear in the fact that human identical
00:40:20.020
twins exist where the conception happens and then it splits into two humans and chimeras
00:40:24.680
exist where two different fertilized eggs end up forming into one human.
00:40:30.100
This is something, both of those things don't happen in all species.
00:40:33.300
God didn't need to make them happen in our species.
00:40:35.200
That he did seems like a pretty loud signal that the early Catholic thinkers were right
00:40:40.400
and not the penis ripoff guy, not the caliphate guy, not the anti-freedom of religion, anti-freedom
00:40:47.980
I think that there's this, oh, this is what we've always thought in perspective.
00:40:55.160
And I'm trying to break this, not as an attack on Catholics, but because I want to save the
00:41:01.320
I think that it has something to offer our civilization, but by the numbers right now,
00:41:07.460
if it keeps doing what it's doing, it will die.
00:41:12.020
Admitting you have a problem is the first step to hopefully doing something to address it.
00:41:16.980
And I hope that awareness is raised about this actual issue because clearly the current stances
00:41:22.900
being taken are not effective and a lot of introspection and inward looking, I think,
00:41:31.420
And I also think more focus on the actual infrastructure of relationship formation within the Catholic
00:41:39.080
Because one reason why probably people are even getting the abortions that they're getting
00:41:45.300
And I bet if they were in unhappy marriages at younger ages, those abortions would have
00:41:50.960
turned into live births, which is really sad too.
00:41:57.340
Some of the Catholics that have reached out to us have indicated that they live in small,
00:42:01.180
all Catholic communities that are very high fertility rate and absolutely religiously zealot.
00:42:06.320
These are the communities that will end up replacing the current Catholic Church and potentially
00:42:12.740
I'm super okay with that because these people we've met are awesome.
00:42:16.060
But the challenge that these communities have is they are ruled by a central bureaucracy
00:42:23.540
It is so challenging to be a community that is being dragged towards the urban monoculture,
00:42:30.640
not just from the culture around you, but your central ruling bureaucracy, which is setting
00:42:38.580
I think what we really need to see is a Catholic break-off church.
00:42:48.200
An order of nuns slash priest-like Catholics that all take a vow to be high fertility and
00:43:08.660
And I do hope the Catholics have solved this because I'm worried after seeing these stats.
00:43:16.020
We can't help, but hopefully you've worked this out on your own somehow.
00:43:31.480
I said I looked like Dobie the house elf, and so I figured gray.