The Catholic Fertility Crisis: Do They Only Have Two Generations Left?!

This episode delves into the fertility trends among Catholics, analyzing statistical data that suggests a potential decline in the Catholic population due to below-replacement fertility rates.

1. Declining Fertility Rates: Catholic communities, particularly in Western nations, face declining fertility rates, significantly below the necessary replacement level.
2. Contraception and Abortion Rates: Contrary to common perceptions, Catholics use contraception and undergo abortions at rates similar to non-Catholics.
3. Marriage Trends: Catholics are marrying later and less frequently, which significantly affects their fertility rates compared to other religious groups.
4. Impact of Religious Practices: The episode highlights how religious teachings on contraception and IVF might be contributing to lower fertility rates among Catholics.
5. Cultural Differences Within Catholicism: There is a notable difference in fertility rates and behaviors between Hispanic Catholics and non-Hispanic white Catholics, influenced by cultural factors.

1: Introduction and Overview

The hosts introduce the topic of Catholic fertility, discussing the urgency and relevance of declining fertility rates within Catholic communities. Simone Collins: "This is going to be an episode our fans are going to love because the stat heavy fertility episodes always do spectacular."

2: Data Review and Analysis

Discussion of various studies and data sources that outline the fertility trends among Catholics, highlighting how these trends compare to other demographic groups. Malcolm Collins: "The TFR for non-Hispanic white Catholic women in the United States is 1.64."

3: Sociocultural Factors

Exploration of sociocultural factors affecting fertility rates, such as marriage, contraception, and abortion, within Catholic populations. Simone Collins: "It doesn't really appear to impact the rate that Catholics use contraception or get abortions very highly."

4: Religious Implications and Responses

The hosts discuss the religious implications of the findings and how Catholic teachings might adapt to address these challenges. Malcolm Collins: "It's by doubling down on the aestheticism, but aiming for the early church instead of the modern church."

1. Community Engagement: Increase community support and engagement within Catholic communities to help foster relationships and family formation.
2. Education on Family Planning: Provide more comprehensive education on fertility and family planning that aligns with religious beliefs but also addresses modern realities.
3. Reevaluate Teachings: Consider reevaluating Catholic teachings on contraception and IVF in light of demographic data and fertility challenges.
4. Support Early Marriage: Create supportive environments for earlier marriage within the community to help increase fertility rates.
5. Promote Dialogue: Encourage open dialogue within the community about fertility issues, aiming to reduce stigma around discussing contraception and fertility treatments.

In this eye-opening video, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the startling fertility decline within the Catholic Church, both in the United States and globally. Through a comprehensive analysis of survey data and demographic trends, they uncover the shocking reality that Catholic fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels, and even devout Catholics are using contraception and obtaining abortions at rates similar to non-religious individuals. The couple explores the potential causes of this phenomenon, including delayed marriage, the influence of the urban monoculture, and the disconnect between the Church's teachings and the behavior of its adherents. They also discuss the theological debate surrounding the beginning of life and the impact of the celibate priesthood on the Church's ability to provide relevant guidance on relationships and family formation. Throughout the video, Malcolm and Simone offer thought-provoking insights and propose potential solutions to revitalize the Catholic Church and ensure its survival in the face of this fertility crisis.

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Malcolm Collins
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. On the other hand, catholic churches will see appreciable decline. He says that they have 1.9 children, but these don't separate out the hispanic catholic population. The TFR for non hispanic white catholic women in the United States is 1.64 anyway, so he thinks it's 1.9, which it really isn't. 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.

Simone Collins
Whoa. Therefore, these churches. And this was the inflated 1.9 number that's including the hispanic population. Okay. A 40% decline in the next generation.

Wow. 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. We'll go over the survey data right here. Let's go for non religious affiliation.

Malcolm Collins
So they must be doing it, like, way more than Catholics, right? Morning after pills, presumably? No. 33% to 35%. Hold on.

All of this gets worse. It's just gonna be like, oh, and it gets worse? How can this possibly get worse? We just learned that Catholics have abortions at rates similar to those who are not Catholic. I know what people are thinking.

They're thinking, okay, but this is just lumping all Catholics into one group. What if we divide Catholics by how religious they are? So, moen, before we go further, I got more stats for you here. God, it can't get any worse. Oh, it gets worse.

Every stat here is. This situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined. Would you like to know more? Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone Collins. We are so excited to be here with you today.

And I am excited to be talking to you today, Simone, because this is going to be an episode our fans are going to love because the stat heavy fertility episodes always do spectacular. We're looking at here some terrifying numbers. Yes. So I have mentioned before that Catholics have a lower fertility rate than non Catholics when you control for income, and that catholic countries seem to be hit by fertility collapse a lot faster and harder than other countries. For example, the average european catholic majority country has a fertility rate of only 1.3.

You have the rapid declines in fertility across Latin America, with examples like Uruguay in just the past seven years, going from an above replacement fertility rate to only run 1.3. Argentina. If you're looking at the four year olds who are entering kindergarten this year, there is going to be 30% less than just four years ago. You look at Costa Rica, where a local demographer used the term vertiginous to describe their fertility situation, and local women have below one fertility right now. So just absolutely catastrophic.

But what has always been said to me is, for whatever reason, this is not true of american Catholics. Okay, is that true? I idly decided I had taken it as a fact because so many people had told me this. Yeah, sounds like it might be true. The Catholics that we know have a lot of kids.

Simone Collins
So it seems to totally check out. Of the pronatalist movement. There are a number of catholic thought leaders in the movement. So I was like, okay. But I will also note of the pronatalist Catholics that I know of.

Malcolm Collins
They fall into two categories. They are either weirdly unmarried and childless, younger people, or married with a lot of kids, older people. But the unique thing about the Catholics in the prenatalist movement is that when they are younger, they are much more likely to be unmarried. Now, I'll get to this, because this actually is what the statistics would suggest we would find. So I decided to google this.

What is the TFR of Catholics in the USA? And I will put the results on screen here. The very first result is the AI review of the literature, which says in 2023, the total fertility rate for Catholics in the United States was just over 1.6. But then I go down and I find a study that looks into this, right? So the TFR for non hispanic white catholic women in the United States is 1.64 as of.

Simone Collins
Does it give a year? This is the terrifying thing it does. This study was done in 1992. Oh, no. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
So it's almost certainly below that now. Yeah. Because I haven't seen in any instance, there have been tiny improvements, but not any crazy bounce back. So we can't expect it to have gone up significantly. And it is much lower than the protestant fertility rate in study.

The average protestant fertility rate was 1.91. So 1.64 for Catholics. Now, if these numbers are correct, it means the average catholic fertility rate in the United States is below the average fertility rate in the United States. What on earth? But we'll go into more data here because I.

Simone Collins
Okay, yeah, this is. Maybe it's being offset by these ultra religious Catholics that we're hearing about. Because I keep hearing about these hypothetical ultra pro family, ultra religious Catholics, and the stats are basically show that they don't we'll get to them in just a second. One is an article actually written by a Catholic for Catholics, the alarming fertility decline among catholic women. So first we need to note something, what we're seeing right now, and I'm going to read some quotes here from the study that was looking at this, that they say this contrasts with the pattern during the baby boom era where Catholics had a higher fertility than Protestants.

Malcolm Collins
The authors state that, quote, the baby boom era pattern of high catholic and low protestant fertility has ended most of the. Now, what's causing this difference? And this is where it gets interesting. Cause the studies have actually looked at this. Most of the protestant catholic difference in fertility is related to Catholics marrying later and less frequently compared to Protestants.

When looking at currently married women, the difference in fertility between Catholics and Protestants was smaller, indicating later and less frequent marriage among Catholics as a key factor. The marital fertility of white catholic wives was still higher than that of non catholic wives in 1977 to 1981. But this difference has disappeared when Hispanics were excluded from the catholic group. Basically, I'll word this. In other words, once Catholics are married, they have the same fertility rate as other Americans.

Not a higher fertility rate, but about the same as other religious Americans, but. They'Re struggling with relationships. So let's look like anecdotally. Okay. Okay.

Let's look at the catholic influencers that I know about. Nick Fuentes talks all the time about american fertility rates, and he's still unmarried. He cannot. Pearl Davis. Oh, no.

Or Pearl Davis used to subscribe to the Channel unsubscribe. I don't know what I did to anger her. Maybe it was a tracked episode. You're like, sometimes people just unsubscribe. I'm like, she must have been thinking something when she did that.

I don't know. I still like her. She's cool. I wish she could find a husband, but she hasn't found a husband. And this is interesting, right?

And then I think more broadly at the young Catholics I know in the pronatalist movement, and not one of them is married, when it is actually fairly rare to see unmarried people from other groups. They might be struggling to have a kid, but just completely unmarried. Yeah. So first I want to see if you have some thoughts here, because the stats will keep going and get worse. Yeah.

Simone Collins
My first intuition, and I wonder if this is maybe at play, is that more protestant jewish communities in the United States have stronger overall community in town social networks, meaning people are more likely to find partners, whereas I don't really think about catholic towns where you would really see a religiously affiliated dating market the same way you would with. I can think of cities and towns that are very baptist or very evangelical, and you can end up with a very strong church community. They're certainly very mormon, et cetera. So my hunch, I disagree with this hunch pretty strongly. I think Catholics have great social networks considering that a lot of the Catholics.

Malcolm Collins
So you're thinking Catholic, but a lot of the Catholics come from minority immigrant communities like Irish and Italian Americans. And if you think about the Irish Catholic, it's because you're thinking Catholic broadly instead of about what catholic communities actually are, which is often ethno national communities like the old mafia families is probably what you should be thinking more of instead of this modern idea of what a Catholic is to a Protestant. And these families have great networks often. So I don't think that's it. Now, before I give my hypotheses, I'm going to throw out some more stats here that will further scare anyone who is concerned about Catholics continuing to exist.

So this is a quote from limestone. Likewise, pentecostal churches will grow with an actual fertility of 2.1, substantially above the needed fertility, 1.8. So let's talk about what needed fertility is. Needed fertility is the fertility rate that you would need to have to stay stable as a cultural group. When you account for the bleed that your cultural group has, that is the percentage of people who deconvert from your religion per generation.

On the other hand, catholic and orthodox churches will see appreciable decline. He says that they have 1.9 children in both. But these are the 1.9 studies. They're the ones that don't separate out the hispanic catholic population. Now hold on.

I will note here about the hispanic catholic population. Why am I considering them separate? Because their fertility rate is declining rapidly. It's declining in their home countries, it's declining in the United States. It's declining much faster than just about any other fertility rate out there right now.

So it's certainly not going to contribute to the higher catholic fertility rate in a few years. When I say higher, I mean it's a lower fertility rate than you would expect. But it's bolstering the catholic fertility rate in the United States in some studies, way above that 1.6 number. And the, the second is that culturally they're a very different group. The irish and italian catholic cultural groups are just, while they're like superficially the same religion as the hispanic cultural group, the way that they, as somebody who's lived like, we live a lot in hispanic majority countries.

Like, we used to split our time between Miami and Lima in terms of where we were living. And both of us have gone to school in the UK, so we've also been around a lot of, like, irish communities. They are not culturally the same communities. Not at all. Anyway, so I'm gonna keep reading here.

So he thinks it's 1.9, which it really isn't. 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. Whoa. Therefore, these churches, and this is with the inflated 1.9 number that's including the hispanic population. Okay.

A 40% decline in the next generation. Wow. Like, wow. Well, especially. And here's the thing, too.

Simone Collins
They're extra screwed if they're getting married later, because then they're starting their fertility journey later, and they don't believe in using ivF, it seems. And yes, so a lot of this is, I think, actually downstream of the abortion stuff Catholics view that life begins at conception. The problem with this view is that by the statistics, and we will go over the statistics here, it doesn't really appear to impact the rate that Catholics use contraception or get abortions very highly. Wait, so Catholics in surveys are reporting that they're getting abortions at rates similar to non Catholics? Yes, we'll go over the survey data right here.

Malcolm Collins
Okay, so I'll read the quote. Finally, a bit of even more disturbing news for Orthodox Catholics. First, as shown in figure eight, the percentages of catholic women using so called morning after pills is quite high. Among those who have ever had sexual intercourse, 25% have, 32%. Among never married women ages 15 to 44 have.

So if you look here and you look at the percent who have used morning after pills, for example, of Catholics, for the overall, it's 25%. For the never married, at 32%. Now contrast this with evangelical Protestants, where for the never married, it's only 20%, and for the married it's 28%. Or you can go for black Protestants, 2020, 1% respectively. Or you can go with Catholics are.

Simone Collins
Doing it more, I guess. They can ask for forgiveness. They can ask for forgiveness. It's. Okay, hold on.

Malcolm Collins
But this is of the protestant groups. Okay, so let's know. The mainline Protestants do it slightly more than Catholics. So remember, for Catholics overall, it was 25%. For the mainline Protestants, it's 26%.

So slightly more. And so these are. But okay, let's go for non religious affiliation. So they must be doing it, like, way, way more than Catholics. Right.

Morning after pills, presumably. No. 33% to 35% for the non married women group. Keep in mind in Catholics that 32% who have done it, 35% for the non religious denomination. Now, hold on.

We're gonna look, we're gonna go into even more chilling statistics for Catholics out there. Oh, no. Figure nine shows the percentages of women who have ever been pregnant who admitted to having an abortion. Okay. Yeah.

Simone Collins
So we're getting into more serious ground. Yeah. Not just morning after. Okay. So for Catholics here, overall, it was 13%.

Malcolm Collins
Never married, it was 20%. Contrast this with evangelical Protestants. Overall, it's 12%. And never married, it's 19%. Now, if we go to mainline Protestants.

Okay. These people are, like, not very religious. Often. They must be. No, it was 13% overall for Catholics, 16% for the mainline Protestants, and then for the never married group, 26% when contrasted with the catholic, 20%.

Now, if you look at the no religious affiliation at all here, you actually get a slightly bigger boost, with it being 28% and 33%, respectively, but still not as big as you would expect. That's a lot of people getting abortions. That's a lot. Yeah. Wow.

It's a lot more people getting abortions than I would expect as well. Genuinely. Like, genuinely. Apparently, birth control is not as widely used as I thought, which surprises me, because I was not sexually active before I met you, and yet I had been on birth control for years to control acne. I don't know.

Simone Collins
It's just bizarre to me that so few women are on it. Hold on. All of this gets worse. It's just gonna be like, oh, and it gets worse? How can this possibly get worse?

We just learned that Catholics have abortions at rates similar to those who are not Catholics. This is. So now we're getting into the next issue, which is, in fact, the. This is. This is.

Malcolm Collins
I'm quoting from the article where these come from. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences estimates that, at least at earlier versions of the NSFG. That's this study right here, up to half or more of all abortions were not reported by the women who had them. This type of survey error is called selective recall bias. So, basically, if you have a strong religious reason to not recall something in a survey, you often won't.

Simone Collins
What you're saying is a lot of catholic women who filled this out and said they did not have an abortion, have had an abortion, have, based on. Other surveys that have been done. This is a mistake we see in the data. Now we're going to look at another thing here because I know what people are thinking. They're thinking, okay, but this is just lumping all Catholics into one group.

Malcolm Collins
What if we divide Catholics by how religious they are? And I have done that here, and it doesn't solve the problem. Right here we are dividing them by church attendance. We have a once a month group, a one to three times a month group, and a weekly group. So less than once a month at the first one to three times weekly.

Okay. Okay. This is the ever married, ever used artificial birth control of any type. So have they used artificial birth control? So of the people who don't go to church or go to church less than once a month Catholics, 99% have used birth control.

Okay. Okay. What about the people who go one to three times a month? 98%. Okay, what about the people who go weekly?

The really devout ones? 95%. This is so odd because we meet so many catholic and otherwise harder line protestant people who will not shut up about birth control being so unnatural and bad, and yet it's so pervasively used. I guess that's why they're going on about it. But this really surprises.

She ain't over here. I've got to go through a few other things. If that many of them are using birth control, are also that many of them so unconscientious that they don't use it enough to need actually to use. Morning after an abortion control of any type, let's narrow it down. Okay.

Simone Collins
Okay. Let's say of the Catholics who were married and ever used birth control, that does not include condoms or vasectomies, plan B and abortions, et cetera, the pill, etcetera, okay? Yeah. Of the group that goes less than once a month, it's 94%. Of the group that goes three to four times a month, it's 88%.

Malcolm Collins
And of the group who goes weekly, it's 81%. So the restrictions are just not that effective within the community. Do you want to talk about abortions? So if we're talking about abortions here, the difference between the groups is 24%. One in four Catholics who goes to a church less than once a month has had an abortion or admits to having an abortion.

That's why. Wouldn't that just be also mentally tough to go to a church that has such views? I guess it helps that you can. Confess, but still, one to three times a month, 22%. And then these very religious Catholics that go weekly.

Okay, weekly plus 11%. Over one in ten Catholics who is going to a church very frequently by, you have a group of ten Catholics. One of them are catholic women. So 20 Catholics, but catholic women, one of them has had an abortion. What this really says to me is that our message around cultural sovereignty and hold on, hold on.

Simone Collins
Productive choice really matters in that you should focus in on your own group. If you believe abortion is bad, try to get your own group to ban abortion internally, but to impose that on other people is why it doesn't work. But Simone, before we go further, I got more stats for you here. It can't get any worse. Oh, it gets worse.

Malcolm Collins
Every stat here is the situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined. So the next one is. So some Catholics might be watching this and they're like, yeah, but I know a number of Catholics who attend church weekly and are still not very religious. So what if instead we separated Catholics by how religious they are? Between very somewhat and not okay, and we ask the same questions.

Ever used artificial birth control of any type? 100%. Of the non religious ones, not surprising. But of the religious ones, it's 99%. And of the very religious ones, it's 96%.

If you're talking about had an abortion, of the not religious ones, it was 27%. But of the very religious ones, it was whopping 18% of Catholics. Of the ones who are married and used artificial birth control, other than condoms and vasectomies, that is, morning after pill, the pill, etcetera, or abortions themselves, 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. 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, it is going to directly overlap with a heat map of how low fertility rates are across the EU. There appears to be a direct link between how restrictive the culture is around abortion and how low its fertility rate is.

Simone Collins
So the issue is that Catholics aren't. Catholic ing, and we've got to talk about why. Because they are Catholic ing when it comes to things like IVF, they are. And this is a major problem. Like when I say I'm afraid of Catholics going extinct, I very sincerely mean that when we have studies showing us that by 2060, 50% of men in the developed world are not going to be fertile anymore, and then you get the.

Malcolm Collins
And so if they ban IVF, they're banning 50% of their population from having kids, and they already have terrible fertility rates. And why are they doing this, this is where it gets really tragic and sad to me. So people on our show, they'll know. We talk about, like, high and low muslim culture. There are.

Is absolutely an iteration of muslim culture that goes out and defaces things in museums and attempts to start a caliphate, 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. But then there's a side of muslim culture, which is where the Muslim golden age did. And like all of our muslim scientists come from. And I have a number of muslim friends who are very enlightened, philosophically engaged people.

Like, within every culture, you get to choose the high road or the low road, right? And Catholicism, it has a high road. It has its Thomas Aquinas and Augustus of Hippo, but it also has a low road. The mad pope, Pius IX, who wrote the syllabus of errors, basically calling for a catholic caliphate. For people who aren't familiar with the syllabus of errors, I can read some stuff on it.

So people know. 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. Some quotes here. 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 and to propagate the pest of indifferentism. 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.

Another one is in the present day, it is no longer expedient. The catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship wants. He's against these things. He thinks that we need to end this. But he is also the pope who ordered the great castration, the going out and ripping the penises off of statues made by higher than his own, that he personally could not even see the worthiness of this art, just like this level of cultural depravity.

But here's the problem, right? I contrasted these three individuals. It turns out that the only reason that Catholics today think that life begins at conception is because of the mad pope, Pius IX, the great castration guy. The syllabus of errors guy. Oh, boy.

Thomas Aquinas Augustus of Hippo. They thought life began 30 to 90 days after the fetus began developing, so they'd have no problem with IVF. So you're really getting this option with Catholicism, which is culturally, where do Catholics go? Do they go back to their great figures in their history and try to revitalize a true older form of Catholicism? 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. And Protestants have gone through dark periods like this as well, where they've defaced things. Gotta admit, Protestants went through lots of great art and just defaced it, because as much as I make it, I do not. So many catholic church interiors that used to have priceless art. Yeah.

Yeah. So every culture has a high road and a low road. It's which iteration of that culture do you decide that you want to follow? So I think that's one thing that we have to note here, right, is if you're gonna get married later, you got this issue. Oh, hold on.

I've got some more stats here to go over really quickly, or here what we're going to do is we are going to put a silver lining on this, potentially. Okay, that sounds nice. At this point, please. Some other stats that we didn't get a chance to mention. Among ever married catholic women aged 35 to 44, the percentage having five or more live births dropped more than six times between 1976 and the most recent data, six fold.

But more devout people do have more kids. The problem is, I haven't been able to find this broken out by religion. So I don't know. What is also really interesting in these statistics that I'll put on screen here is that while more devout people have more kids, the number of kids that non devout people plan on having when they are 18 to 24 actually isn't that much lower than the number that devout people plan on having. It's just the actual realized fertility potential is much higher for the devout people.

They're just in the expectation among the other group just goes down and converges with the number of kids they actually end up having. As time goes on, you'll see this in the graph. So that's a little bit of a. Maybe there's a way out of this, but now we need to talk about why are Catholics marrying later than other groups? And this is something I can only speculate on.

But here is my thought. And of course I have to go into some stereotyping about the Catholics. I know Catholics are typically, in my experience, much more intellectually heady, and things need to be technically correct in terms of how they approach life and much less, I guess I call it, like, passionful in the way that they approach things. It's more what does the research say? What is the very nerdy, but in a type of nerdy that's very divergent with our type of nerdy?

Our type of nerdy is very much let's head for the truth and look at the statistics and find out how, like, the authorities are lying to us. Where the catholic nerdy is. Let's go through the ancient literature and the great thinkers and everyone genius who has written on this subject. I think you need both of these working next to each other in an ecosystem to produce great outcomes. But consider finding a wife with these two hats on, or finding a husband with these two hats on.

You're going to be much more interested in the particulars of an individual rather than just making it work if you're approaching it with this heady perspective, whereas if you're approaching it with this, you just have to make things work. And to an extent, like, even though we try to quarantine our emotions as much as possible, I would still say there's much more emotional leak into our actions, which may be leading us to sublimate this basically checklist mentality a bit more than Catholics do. That is one hypothesis. Here is the other hypothesis. It might be that historically, because we do know that historically, as I mentioned in all of these studies, pre seventies Catholics really did have a higher fertility rate, and they got this higher fertility rate by their perspectives on contraception, which did genuinely increase their fertility rates.

It might be that the catholic cultural group was basically able to cheese their fertility rate for a long time and not develop other mechanisms to motivate people to find partners and have kids because they had the boost from their bans on contraception, and when those bans stopped being effective anymore, then they didn't have the rest of the cultural technology that motivated kids for the sake of kids instead of because you're having sex and not using contraception. And so there's all of this talk around, and you see this within catholic communities, like elevation of life and children as being these great, glorious things. However, I feel like the way the catholic community intellectually relates to these concepts is in the abstract and not in the actual. I think it's the same way that they relate to marriage for example, how much does like Nick Fuentes opine on the type of person you need to be to get a good partner? Now, if you're approaching information like a Simone or Malcolm, I would immediately discount anything he says about the way a married couple should live their lives because he, or the way you should go about securing a partner because whatever he's doing clearly isn't working.

But a Catholic, like the way that Catholics intellectually relate to information, might actually take advice on how to find a partner from somebody like him, because he aesthetically is giving views that align with great thinkers in history who they have respect for, even if functionally, him following those perspectives has shown to not work within our modern context. Yeah, yeah, there, there does seem to be a risk with Catholicism of becoming so divorced from, we'll say, like this source material, and instead looking at experts who analyze experts and eventually become too separated from the actual religion. But I can't see a direct line between that and fertility rates. I just. I think it's telling one that there clearly is a lot of, we'll say, functional attrition taking place with Catholicism.

Simone Collins
Like they may. You might say that you're Catholic, but the urban monoculture is driving more of your behavior, if not your thoughts and you would like, or in practice. And then I do think that there's something going on with community formation. Most of the community amenities, services, even missionary work that I've encountered in my life. And of course, this is anecdotal, so it's not great information, but it hasn't been Catholic, it's been protestant.

And I do think that those are signs. 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 auctions, if I don't see events, then I'm probably also not encountering a community that is providing dating solutions. And keep in mind that people often meet each other at these things as well. So I just. I don't know.

I don't. It could be that the Catholic Church has so much dedicated to its own. I'm just thinking about it now. That's what I'm saying. And it could be a structural issue, because, for example, most protestant groups are not really oriented around a large, sprawling church.

The attention goes more to mission oriented things or local community events and programming. Whereas because the catholic church has orders of priests and nuns and payroll and staff and bureaucracy and internal processes, it could be that it's developed a form of governing bureaucratic bloat that has caused resources, it would otherwise go toward community programming, like mission work, like community services, like matchmaking. Now, that's instead going to training priests and maintaining orders of nuns and maintaining the internal apparatus of Vatican City, etcetera. I have two other ideas I've come up while you've been talking here. Okay.

Malcolm Collins
Okay. One idea is the aesthetic idealism of Catholics is what is causing them to get married later. So when I talk about the aesthetic idealism of Catholics, I don't even. Do I need to explain what I mean by this concept? You know what I'm talking about when I say Catholics are ethnic idealists?

Like, they really like this grandeur feeling. This. Everything is like, this is the way you do a marriage, for it to be just and good. Right. This is the way you live your life, for it to be just and good.

And it's an aesthetic direction of perfection and grace and beauty. And there is, you know, obviously, there's something motivating about this, but it's pretty bad at feeling the deal with specific other individuals, because it's very easy for someone to not meet this aesthetic idealism in a fallen world. So that could be one. Okay, next. What if it is downstream of the priest class being celibate?

Because you're talking about this giant bureaucracy that the Catholics have, and one unique thing about the catholic bureaucracy that is often acting as their dating coaches and life coaches and psychologists, like, when it's functioning correctly. Right. They're celibate. They haven't gone through these trials. Oh, and so these.

Simone Collins
Yeah, basically, the tribal elders of the catholic community are not speaking from experience when helping people form relationships, or that is to say, romantic sexual relationships or get married or find a partner, because they themselves did not successfully do that. They didn't want to. It wasn't their contrast. Like a young jew or a young Mormon. Right.

Malcolm Collins
I go to my rabbi, and I talk about dating problems or finding a wife or something like that. Or I go to state president. Yeah, whoever. Yeah. They're gonna probably have a ton of.

They're gonna be able to talk from a position of not empathy. I really. Some people don't know the difference. Empathy is when you're talking about an emotion that you've had before, and you can put yourself in their shoes through mirroring the emotion through. When you've had sympathy, it's when you're.

You can imagine what it's like to be them, but you haven't actually experienced something like that yourself. When you switch, you got it mixed up. I got it mixed up. It's empathy is one. And the empathy.

Simone Collins
Yeah, it's the same word. Simone is the smarter one. And you're proving it again right here. Wrong, Malcolm. I just.

Malcolm Collins
We'll see, we'll see. I'll just leave this whole thing in. I won't even check it when I'm doing editing. And then couple things. Okay.

Simone Collins
I think you make a good point there, though. If the influencers of your space are giving advice, it's going to get. Our general rule of thumb is the advice that you take from someone is advice that's going to get you where they are. And if you're getting advice on relationships from a celibate person who works in a bureaucracy. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
You can end up married. Then consider, like, we've gotta. We've gotta flip this. Consider how this is actually protective of the aesthetic idealism problem I was talking about. So when you go to a rabbi that's actually had to deal with being married to someone and finding a spouse, and you're like, look, they don't live up to my ideal of what a woman should be in these areas.

They're gonna be like, buddy, it's like that for everyone. You'll grow together. It'll work out. Yeah. You go to the catholic priest, because they've never actually had to deal with these compromises in a marriage.

They are much less likely to be compromising on those aesthetic. Yeah. You can talk to a nun. She's basically married to Jesus. That's a high bar.

Simone Collins
She's comparing all men to Jesus. Yeah. She's comparing your husband, your potential husband, to Jesus. No, it's hard. And then you've got to keep in mind that as a Catholic, and this is another huge problem that Catholics have because of the priesthood, is typically your most devout members.

Malcolm Collins
Okay. Your fanatics are the people who, in a normal religion, are pumping out the most kids in Catholicism. You're mimetically castrating them. Your most devout members are entering the priesthood.

Rather than by having kids. So if I would make a few prescriptive changes for Catholicism, one is the celibate priesthood just doesn't make sense anymore. It's not a biblical thing. It's definitely not in the Bible that your priest should be celibate. This is something that was made up after it was made up, with good reason, I think when it was first made up to prevent nepotism within church institutions.

Great reason to do it initially. It doesn't make sense anymore. End it to this life begins at conception thing. During the greatest periods when your church was still this living entity that was producing all these amazing and great thinkers that I look to respect and that I draw religious authority from. Even as a non Catholic, I can go to the writings of someone like Thomas Aquinas and feel like getting information from somebody who is genuinely touched by God in his writings.

And these have theological import to them, whereas when I look at more modern catholic writings, they read like, research abstracts. Like, it's. It's. It's the difference between the living and a dead religion. Right.

And to bring a religion back to life, you have to bring the theological conversation back to life, which means you need to be having a living conversation about the theology. And that's the final thing I would say. It's that the conversation about the catholic theology needs to become more of a living thing in the way it is within protestant communities. If you look at, like, the premillennialists versus post millennialist Protestants and you look at them debating, this is a living conversation, even if it's, like, nuanced stuff, they are passionate about this. I don't see this because I watch a lot of, like, religious communities talking to each other.

With the catholic religious authorities, it always feels more like an academic debate. Yeah. And so it's. How can you bring that passion back in? I think it's by doubling down on the aestheticism, but the aestheticism of the old and the aesthetic.

Not aestheticism, like, being an aesthetic, but the aesthetic drive or morality. I think you can maintain that because I think that's key to catholic culture. But to aim for the early church instead of the modern church, which should. Take you closer to the true church, any organization that grows over time is going to drift a little bit. Sometimes you have to reorient back home.

Yeah. So to aim for the early church, restructure around that and to would be the second thing, the priesthood thing. I just don't know how you can fix this issue when your entire ruling bureaucracy has never had to find a spouse in a world where the difficulty of finding a spouse has become astronomically harder. If you're talking about the mormon prophet, right. He's an old guy, so he's out of touch, was what the modern dating market is, but at least he has, like, some connection to it.

Like, at least eventually somebody's going to be in that position who has dealt with something like a modern dating market that will just never happen with the catholic community. So there is not the same mandate to update their perspectives. And you even have the pope now calling for people. There was a quote recently that like, women need to have more kids and they're shirking their duties. Wow, that's intense.

Simone Collins
And I wish there were something more productive to say, aside from. I still think the big thing is when people look at falling birth rates and they think that the solution is to impose one cultural solution on everyone, I don't think that's the right answer. And I think cultures really need to look within and solve their own problems before doing things like trying to universally ban abortion, which is only causing things to become harder for Catholics in many ways, because now a bunch of people are pushing back where they wouldn't otherwise see pushback. So, yeah, I also feel like a lot of people may be stepping away from the catholic church because of these developments, which is only going to hurt. Them more, really affecting abortion rates within your own community.

Malcolm Collins
Like, instead of focusing on this deontological and, like, ethical structure to build relations. And if people want to hear more of our catholic abortion debate, you can go to our video, who's actually killing more kids? Other Catholics, where we go into that question and the theology behind it, really in detail. For me, I think the sign that God does not. Did not intend us to believe that life begins at conception and meant for us to know.

This is really clear in the fact that human identical twins exist, where the conception happens, and then it splits into two. Humans and chimeras exist, where two different fertilized eggs end up forming into one human. This is something both of those things don't happen in all species. God didn't need to make them happen in our species. That he did seems like a pretty loud signal that the early catholic thinkers were right, and not the penis ripoff guy, not the caliphate guy, not the anti freedom of religion, anti freedom of press, anti.

I think that there's this, oh, this is what we've always thought, perspective. And it's just. It's useful to help break that. And I'm trying to break this not as an attack on Catholics, but because I want to save the catholic cultural group. I think that it has something to offer our civilization, but by the numbers right now, if it keeps doing what it's doing, it will die.

It will die. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to hopefully doing something to address it. And I hope that awareness is raised about this actual issue, because clearly the current stances being taken are not effective. And a lot of introspection and inward looking, I think, would do good. And I also think more focus on the actual infrastructure of relationship formation within the catholic church needs to be revisited, because one reason why probably people are even getting the abortions that they're getting is because they're not married.

Simone Collins
And I bet if they were in unhappy marriages at younger ages, those abortions would have turned into live births, which is really sad, too. So I think that's true. Here's the real fix. Some of the Catholics that have reached out to us have indicated that they live in small, all catholic communities that are very high fertility rate and absolutely religiously zealot. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
These are the communities that will end up replacing the current catholic church and potentially saving it. I'm super okay with that because these people we've met are awesome. Yeah. But the challenge that these communities have is they are ruled by a central bureaucracy that is much more moderate than they are, and it's out of touch with them, for sure. So challenging to be a community that is being dragged towards the urban monoculture, not just from the culture around you, but your central ruling bureaucracy, which is setting your church mandate.

I think what we really need to see is a catholic break off church. I think that's what's going to survive. We'll see. Or an order. Oh, this would be interesting.

An order of nun priest like Catholics that all take a vow to be high fertility and incredibly religiously, the order of families. I like it. Very cool fecundity. Anyway, what would you call them? The.

The baby friars. The family order. I love you. I love you too. Have a great day.

And I do hope the Catholics solve this, because I'm worried after seeing these stats. We love you, Catholics. Good luck. We can't help but hopefully you work this out on your own somehow. Try some IVF.

You look very pretty, by the way. So do you. I know. The white is better. I know you try hard.

Simone Collins
I looked like Dobie the house elf, and so I figured gray. It's Dobby, by the way. Appropriate for me. All right, let's do it.

Where are we going? Okay. You have fun.

Malcolm Collins
Oh, you gonna eat it?

Simone Collins
It's not dirty. You guys like eating in a rocking bench? What do you think of it?

You're gonna leave the moving vehicle? Go for it, buddy.