By Marc Rastoin, SJ

Our world is living through a change of epoch, marked by the slow crumbling of the myth of eternal and invincible progress. Natural resources are being exhausted, and climate change grows each year more tangible, more troubling. In such a time, to welcome a child into the world has become an act both delicate and daring – an act that presupposes hope, and even faith. Many young people now say they refuse to bring new human beings into this world. It is easy, of course, to mock such a stance, to point out the individualism or selfishness it might conceal. Yet we should not dismiss this reasoning too lightly.

Olivier Clément, a theologian who came to faith as an adult, foresaw with striking lucidity the kairos of our age. Writing in 1975, he observed: “One can understand the hesitation of the young. There used to be, in biological continuity – in its near fatality – a kind of real, though blind and imposed, faith. A day will no doubt come when it will take a conscious faith to dare to bring a child into the world.”

Indeed! To marry and to have children are no longer natural or cultural certainties. A colossal revolution in the human history. For to welcome a child is to believe that life is worth living – that life is a gift worthy of being given again. Despite the shadows of the world, despite evil itself, in the end, “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”, as Julian of Norwich once said. Not because humanity or the planet will necessarily reach a happy end – all signs seem to speak otherwise – but because faith knows that God holds every life in His hands, and will care for every life, even unto the end.

A Son was born to tell us so. Christians do not bring children into the world out of some naïve or archaic trust that the world will improve. No – they welcome children because they believe in the goodness of God toward all living things. They believe that God wills the life of His children beyond death itself. As the theologian Philippe Lefebvre reminds us, the fundamental question of humanity has always been: “Must the son die? Is a son given for death?”

Does God truly will the life of the son? To believe so can be a long and painful struggle. We believe that life is worth living because there will always remain the possibility to love, and to give one’s life. Whatever the state of the world. Yes – it is little wonder that believers are today, in the West, among the few still welcoming children. It touches the very heart of their faith and their hope – those two virtues so closely bound, as Benedict XVI once noted: “In certain passages [of Scripture], the words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ seem interchangeable.”

Some choose to become eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom, bearing witness to the absoluteness of God in the manner of Christ. But tomorrow – and even now – others will bring forth children to proclaim their steadfast faith in the worth of life, and in the power of God who gathers every life into Himself, just as He desired to receive into Himself the Virgin Mary at the end of her earthly days – when, her mission complete, she seemed, in human eyes, to have no further purpose.