✝️ 🇺🇸 🇻🇦 Fulton Sheen's Beatification Mass
69 Bishops
1,000 Priests
850 Seminarians
850 Religious
260 Deacons
50,000 Laity

📝 KatieScarlett: It was the most crowded venue I’ve ever been to. So many young families and young priests and nuns in cassocks and habits. The Church is truly alive.

🛠 Father V: The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated then-Msgr. Fulton Sheen in 1943 because of his strong criticism of Joseph Stalin, then an American ally against Nazi Germany in World War II.
https://www.osvnews.com/why-the-fbi-investigated-archbishop-sheen-during-wwii/

📎 Catholics for Catholics

📖 🇩🇪 🐣 Hitler increased German TFR by ~1 (1.6-2.6), which is absolutely massive, far more successful than any other pro-natal program I'm aware of, except maybe Communist Romania (and Communist Romania's TFR collapsed within two years of Decree 770, Nazi Germany's didn't). You can find American sociology papers from 1935 (!) expressing astonishment at this.

Comparing TFR to early Weimar (whose slightly higher fertility was just a stage of the overall 1900-1933 German fertility collapse) or Baby Boom West Germany is not appropriate, you have to look at trends and comparable countries. Both pre-Nazi German and Baby Boom German fertility followed similar trends (falling to below replacement around 1930, huge spike after the war), but was generally much lower, than other Western countries, and in neither case was high birth rates the direct result of state policy. That's what distinguishes Nazi Germany - most state pronatal programs are very ineffective (like, 0.1 higher TFR than the counterfactual if you make certain assumptions, but still falling ineffective), but this one wasn't. Isn't that interesting? Try to decouple this from WWII and the Holocaust.

📝 Olly Bosque: This JSTOR article assumes the rise in the German fertility rate under the Nazis is due to the prohibition of abortion, information about contraceptives, and favorable tax exemptions to marriages and families with many children.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768366

📎 arctotherium

🗳 🇩🇪 🐣 The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party advocates for a "demographic turnaround" through financial incentives for larger families and strict opposition to abortion, rejecting immigration as a remedy for population decline.

The strong “Erinnerungskultur” (culture of remembrance) in Germany, which involves confronting and acknowledging the crimes of the National Socialist era, means the AfD have been keen to distance themselves from any historical comparisons. As a result, they’ve been cautious, but clear, in how they market their views on promoting the native German birthrate. Their manifesto calls for a “demographic turnaround” they claim will transmit German culture and stabilise the country’s social systems. Although they’ve refrained from setting explicit numerical targets this election cycle, previous campaigns promoted the three-child family as the optimal means of addressing what they refer to as a “birth deficit”. The party’s financial proposals to encourage larger families—including tax credits and pension contributions—remain loosely defined.

Slightly less openly publicised is their corresponding stance on abortion. They argue financial support for couples will reduce what they feel is an excessively high abortion rate. Interestingly, according to World Population Review, the abortion rate in Germany was 5.4 per 1,000 women in 2024. Only 12 of the 151 countries included in the list had lower abortion rates.

However, their proposed policies in this area also remain vague. While stopping short of explicitly calling for an outright ban, the AfD has advocated stringent restrictions and pushed to end the recognition of abortion as a human right, or its support by the state. Evidence from the Guttmacher Institute shows it’s when women have access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, increased education and greater gender equality that abortion rates fall.

The baby bust

Population decline may be among the reasons behind the AfD's popularity. According to sociologist Katja Salomo, "Research shows that electoral support for far-right parties, including the AfD, tends to be higher in the regions most affected by population decline."

In 2023, domestic intelligence found that the AfD's Saxony-Anhalt branch was permeated by a "racist ideology" in violation of the German constitution which guarantees "human dignity" for all.

In its manifesto, the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt argues that immigration is an, "Unsuitable remedy for the extinction of the local population." Instead, it wants to incentivise larger families by, for example, handing out baby bonus payments to parents.

https://populationmatters.org/news/2025/02/the-afd-how-it-could-reshape-german-family-policy-and-climate-action/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24ylyv40y5o