Starting a family in Italy is becoming a "titanic effort" that only the rich can afford, Pope Francis has said, warning that "savage" free-market conditions are preventing the young from having children.
Births in Italy dropped below 400,000 last year for the first time, registering a 14th consecutive annual fall, with the overall population declining by 179,000 to 58.85 million.
Speaking at a conference on the growing demographic crisis, Pope Francis said the declining birth rate signalled a lack of hope in the future, with younger generations weighed down by a sense of uncertainty, fragility and precariousness.
"Difficulty in finding a stable job, difficulty in keeping one, prohibitively expensive houses, sky-high rents andi nsufficient wages are real problems," he said, sitting alongside Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
"The free market, without the necessary corrective measures, becomes savage and produces increasingly serious situations and inequalities," he added.
The pope said pets were replacing children in some households and recounted how a woman at a recent audience had opened her bag and asked for a papal blessing for "her baby", only to reveal that it was a dog.
"I lost my patience and upbraided her saying many children are hungry and you bring me a dog," he said.
But he acknowledged that there were "almost insurmountable constraints" on young women forced to choose between their career and motherhood.
Given the high costs involved in raising children, people are revising their priorities, he added.
"We cannot passively accept that so many young people struggle to realise their family dream and are forced to lower the bar of desire, settling for mediocre substitutes: making money, aiming for a career, travelling, jealously guarding leisure time," he said.
In her address, Ms Meloni criticised what she called "the dominant culture" for making the topic of families almost taboo.
"We live in an era in which speaking about the birth rate, of maternity, of family has become even more difficult, sometimes it seems almost a revolutionary act.
"We want it no longer to be scandalous to say that we are all born of a man and a woman, that it is not taboo to say that the birthrate is not for sale, that the uterus cannot be rented and children are not over-the-counter products that you can choose and then perhaps return," she said.
A shrinking population is a major worry for the eurozone's third-largest country, with the economy minister warning this week that Italy's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) risked dropping by 18% over the next two decades if current birth trends continued.
The education minister said yesterday that current demographics suggested that Italy's school population is set to shrink by one million over the next ten years.
The conference was organised by the Birthrate Foundation, a group with links to Catholic associations that advocate for families.
