From Catholic News Service

Vatican officials, experts examine challenges for modern children

By John Thavis, Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- A four-day Vatican conference examined a long list of challenges, from child labor to gender selection of fetuses, that modern children face.

After hearing continent-by-continent reports, organizers said they were especially worried that older generations are no longer viewing children as the hope of the future -- as evidenced by the declining birthrate in developed and developing countries.

The vulnerability of children should make this topic a priority for Catholic social teaching, said Mary Ann Glendon, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Glendon spoke May 2 at a Vatican press meeting at the end of the conference, which for the first time included young participants from several continents.

Detailed papers presented at the meeting analyzed such themes as the impact of globalization and child labor law on young people in Asia or the efforts by China and India to stem the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses.

"Many of the world's children live under dark shadows of oppression and exploitation. Many do not live to see the light of day or are abandoned to die in the first days of life," Glendon said. "This is particularly true for girls, as the male-female imbalance is now pronounced in populous parts of the world."

In China, one of the academy's experts said, there are now 25 percent more males born than females. The government, realizing that this is creating a potentially huge problem for the future, has begun to take steps to discourage gender selection.

French professor Gerard-Francois Dumont, rector of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, told the conference that, while the world is familiar with the one-child policy of China, one-child families now dominate Europe -- without government coercion.

Dumont also said single-parent households were increasing in Latin America.

Speakers illustrated that threats to children can come in many forms:

-- Paulus Zulu, a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, said millions of children are excluded from society or made "invisible" by armed conflicts, poverty, infant mortality and lack of health care, child labor, child marriage and poor education.

The AIDS epidemic solely has created more than 1 million orphans in South Africa alone, he said. Zulu said he knows this form of suffering firsthand: the father of six children of his own, he is now raising six more nieces and nephews orphaned by AIDS -- and expects more to arrive in the future.

-- Kevin Ryan, a professor at Boston University, said the traditional U.S. family configuration has changed drastically in recent decades: Families are smaller, move more frequently and are much more likely to be single-parent families. The number of working mothers has skyrocketed.

"The space previously filled by the family is being filled by schools, the media and the street," Ryan said. He said the time spent on media and electronic entertainment now averages close to 40 hours a week among the young. Those media, he said, tend to promote a highly sexualized culture, with a message of sexual freedom that drowns out young people's awareness of responsibilities.

-- Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, spoke of a "syndrome of endless adolescence" that encourages young people to avoid responsibility and permanent commitments, making it almost impossible for them to assume the kind of sacrifices required by marriage and raising a family.

-- East European participants warned that the region's young people have experienced widespread disappointment and disillusionment in the transition to a free-market economy, helping to create a spiritual emptiness.

Participants emphasized that for all their problems most young people seem resilient and hopeful. That is something the church should build on, starting with the vitality of its own young members, they said.

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