The Population Explosion: A Theologian's Concern?

O OF the main themes, and the most important, of the World Population Year and the World Population Conference, Bucharest, 1974, will be the population explosion. The reasons are not because doomsday is just round the corner, not because we are soon going to run out of the resources necessary to sustain human life, but because the unprecedented rate of population growth in the second half of this century is helping to make more difficult the task of giving a life in keeping with human dignity to hundreds of millions of the world's inhabitants. If this is true—and such is the consensus of most experts—no post-Vatican II theologian could refuse to admit that the population explosion is the concern of the Church and hence of theologians. We can remove the question mark from the title of this article. If this is obvious to most theologians, certain essential implications are not so obvious or are extremely difficult in practice. A first implication is that the theologian who would put his discipline to work on the population problem must be in possession of the pertinent facts. As Bernard Lonergan has phrased it, "To know the good, it [the human spirit] must know the real; to know the real, it must know the true; to know the true, it must know the intelligible; to know the intelligible, it must attend to the data." This is far from easy, as the problems are so complex, the amount of data so huge, the difficulty of separating fact from hypothesis and ideology so vast. Until recently, the Church has been frankly populationist and reluctant to acknowledge that there is a serious population problem and that, in some cases at least, rates of population growth are excessive. Populorum progressio in a frank passage (no. 37) was the first encyclical to admit the seriousness of rapid population increase without the qualification "some people believe" or some similar reservation. Such reluctance was understandable, for the rates of population growth in this century are unprecedented; demographically we are in a completely new era. It is not the Church alone which has experienced this difficulty in adjusting its thought. Marxists have had even more difficulty in abandoning the idea that the population explosion is a capitalist myth or that the developing countries have for sinister motives of international imperialism been pressured into adopting population-restriction policies, 1 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972) p. 13.