Pope urges Italians to welcome life, reverse demographic decline (Vatican News)

“Children are the hope that makes a people reborn,” Pope Francis said in a May 14 address to a Rome conference on Italy’s demographic crisis. The Pontiff observed that “a society that does not welcome life stops living.” Italy’s declining birth rate—well below the “replacement level”—has commanded the attention of political leaders, and Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi participated in this week’s conference on “the general states of birth.”