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

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.

[00:00:00]

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 rates 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 percent decline in the next generation.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: 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 [00:01:00] use contraception or get abortions very highly.

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

And so they must be doing it like way more than Catholics, right? Morning after pill. Presumably. No, 33 percent to 35%

Simone Collins: Hold on, all of this gets worse.

It's just gonna be like a, 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.

Malcolm Collins: 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? Simone, before we go further, I got more stats for you here. You've got to be kidding me. It can't

Simone Collins: get any worse. Oh, it

Malcolm Collins: gets worse.

Every stat here is this situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: .

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 [00:02:00] love because the. Stat heavy fertility episodes always do spectacular.

Ooh, we're looking at here some terrifying numbers. Oh, really? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Oh, no. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: 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. And then 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 around 1. 3. Argentina, if you're looking at the four year olds who are entering kindergarten this year there is going to be 30 percent 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 [00:03:00] 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, I idly decided I had taken it as a fact because so many people had told me this. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Sounds like it might be true. The Catholics that we know have a lot of kids, so it. Seems to totally check out

Malcolm Collins: of the prenatals movement. There are a number of Catholic the thought leaders in the movement.

So I was like, okay. But, and I will also note of the prenatalist Catholics that I know of they fall into two categories of, 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 [00:04:00] 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.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: The very first result is It, the AI review of the literature. Okay. Which says in 2023, the total fertility rate for Catholics in the United States was just over 1.6.

Ah. But then I go down and I find a study that looks into this, right? Yeah. So the TFR for non-Hispanic, white Catholic women in the United States is 1.64,

Simone Collins: as of

Malcolm Collins: does

Simone Collins: it give a year?

Malcolm Collins: This is the terrifying thing. It does. This study was done in, 1992. Ah!

Simone Collins: Oh no.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so it's almost certainly below that now.

Simone Collins: Yeah, because I haven't seen in any instance, there have been tiny improvements, but not any crazy bounce backs. So we can't expect it to have gone up significantly if it's, , and

Malcolm Collins: it is MUCH lower than the Protestant fertility rate.

Really? In the same study, the [00:05:00] 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 Okay.

Yeah, this is really neat. Okay, 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 gonna read some quotes here, uh, from the study that was looking at this, that they say, this contrast was the pattern during the baby boom era where Catholics had a higher fertility than Protestants.

The authors state that quote, the baby [00:06:00] 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 because 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 less fertility. Later, and less frequent marriage among Catholics, it's 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,

Simone Collins: they're struggling with relationships.

Malcolm Collins: [00:07:00] So let's look like anecdotally. Okay. Okay. Few. 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 Oh, and Pearl Davis.

Simone Collins: Oh no. Or

Malcolm Collins: Pearl Davis. You still subscribe to the channel and subscribe. 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 just 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.

Simone Collins: Yeah, my first intuition, and I wonder if this is maybe at play, is that [00:08:00] more Protestant church communities in the United States have stronger overall community and town social networks, meaning people are more likely to find partners.

Whereas I don't really think about Catholic towns, if 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 there, certainly very Mormon, etc.

I

Malcolm Collins: disagree with this hunch pretty strongly. I think Catholics have great social networks. Consider that a lot of the Catholics, 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.

Yeah. A town, like the old mafia families is probably what you should be thinking more of instead of this modern [00:09:00] 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. Okay. 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 belief that your cultural group has, i. e. 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 study. They're the ones that don't separate out the Hispanic Catholic population. No, hold on. I will note here about the Hispanic Catholic population. Why am I considering them separate? Because their fertility rate [00:10:00] 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 a, 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 it 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 community. Not at all.

Anyway, so I'm going to 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 rates of conversion out of these [00:11:00] 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 percent decline in the next generation.

Simone Collins: Wow. Like, Wow. Well, Especially, and here's the thing too, 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,

Malcolm Collins: 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.

Simone Collins: Wait. So Catholics in surveys are reporting that they're getting abortions at rates similar to non [00:12:00] Catholics. Yes,

Malcolm Collins: we'll go over the survey data right here. Okay. No, 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 percent have, 32 percent 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 percent for the never married at 32%.

Now contrast this with evangelical Protestants, where for the never married it's only 20 percent and for the married it's 28%. Or you can go for black Protestants, 20, 21 percent respectively. Or you can go with main So Catholics are

Simone Collins: doing it more? I guess they can ask

Malcolm Collins: for forgiveness. They can ask for forgiveness.

It's okay. Hold on. But this is of the Protestant groups. Okay. So let's go. Now the mainline Protestants do it slightly more than [00:13:00] Catholics. So remember for Catholics overall, it was 25 percent for the mainline Protestants. It's 26%. Yeah. Slightly more. And so these but okay, let's go for non religious affiliation.

And so they must be doing it like way more than Catholics, right? Morning after pill. Presumably. No, 33 percent to 35%. For the non married women group, keep in mind in Catholics that 32 percent who have done it, 35 percent for the non religious denomination. Now hold on, we're gonna, 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 running after.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so for Catholics here, overall, it was 13%. Never married, it was 20%. Contrast this with Evangelical Protestants.

Overall, it's 12 percent and never married. It's 19%. Now if we go to [00:14:00] mainline Protestants, okay, these people are like, not very religious often, they must be all, no, it was 13 percent overall for Catholics, 16 percent for the mainline Protestants and then for the never married group, 26 percent 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 percent and 33 percent respectively, but still not as big as you would expect.

Simone Collins: That's a lot of people getting abortions. That's a lot.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's a lot more people getting abortions than I would expect as well.

Genuinely,

Simone Collins: 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, 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 a, oh, and it gets worse! How can this possibly get worse? We just learned that Catholics have abortions at [00:15:00] rates similar to those who are not Catholic. This is

Malcolm Collins: So now we're getting into the next issue, which is, in fact, the, this is, 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.

What you're saying

Simone Collins: is a lot of Catholic women who filled this out and said they did not have an abortion have had an abortion

Malcolm Collins: 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. 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 [00:16:00] 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, it's 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 percent 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

Simone Collins: 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 me.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. She ain't over here. I've got to go through a few other things. But also if

Simone Collins: that many of them are using birth [00:17:00] control, are also that many of them so unconscientious that they don't use it enough to need, actually to use the morning after abortion?

That

Malcolm Collins: was birth control of any type. Let's narrow it down. Ah, okay,

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Let's say, of the Catholics who were married, An ever used birth control that does not include condoms or

Simone Collins: vasectomies. I.

Malcolm Collins: e. Plan B and abortions, etc. The pill, etc. Okay?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: 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%. 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. That's wild. Wouldn't that

Simone Collins: just be also mentally tough to go to a church that has such views? I guess it helps that you can confess, [00:18:00] but

Malcolm Collins: still. One to three times a month, 22%. And then these very religious Catholics that go weekly, okay weekly plus.

11%! Over 1 in 10 Catholics who is going to a church very frequently. You have a group of 10 Catholics, one of them are, Catholic women, so 20 Catholic women. One of them has had an abortion.

Simone Collins: What this really says to me is that our message around cultural sovereignty and reproductive 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 both. We've got to talk about why it doesn't

Malcolm Collins: work. But Simone, before we go further, I got more stats for you here. You've got to be kidding me. It can't

Simone Collins: get any worse. Oh, it

Malcolm Collins: gets worse.

Every stat here is this situation is more catastrophic than you could have imagined. So the next one [00:19:00] 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 asked the same questions ever used artificial birth control of any type. 100 percent of the non religious ones, not surprising, but of the somewhat 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 percent of Catholics, of the ones who are married and used artificial birth control other than condom and vasectomies, i. e. morning after pill, the pill, et cetera or abortions themselves. You are looking between 96 percent of the not very religious ones to [00:20:00] 94 percent of the somewhat religious ones and 82 percent of the very religious ones.

 And as a quick put 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.

Malcolm Collins: 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 percent of men in the developed world are not going to, , be fertile anymore.

And then you get the, and so if they ban IVF, they're banning 50 [00:21:00] percent 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. It [00:22:00] 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 pests 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 [00:23:00] exclusion of all other forms of worship. Wants to 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 a guy like 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 began 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 [00:24:00] history and try to revitalize a true older form of Catholicism, or do they go with the guy who went around ripping penises off statutes?

The, 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 deface things.

I've got to, admit Protestants went through lots of great art and just defaced it. Because as much as I'm against mythology, I do not believe it. So many Catholic church

Simone Collins: interiors that used to have priceless art. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: 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 going to get married later, you got this issue. Oh, hold on. I've got some more stats here to go over really quickly. Before. Here, what we're going to do is we are going to put a silver lining on this potentially.

Okay. That

Simone Collins: sounds nice at this point, [00:25:00] please.

Malcolm Collins: 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. And 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 [00:26:00] 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'd call it like passionful in the way that they approach things, it's more what does the research say, what does 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 that 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 [00:27:00] 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. The other hypothesis, it might be that historically, because we do know that historically, as I mentioned in all of these studies, pre 70s, 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 rate.

It might be that the Catholic cultural group was [00:28:00] 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 bands 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 this, 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 [00:29:00] 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.

Simone Collins: 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, [00:30:00] I think it's telling one that there clearly is a lot of a We'll say functional attrition taking place with Catholicism. Like they may, you might say that you're Catholic, but the urban monoculture is driving more of your behavior, if not your thoughts, then 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 [00:31:00] well. So I just, I don't know. I don't, it could be that the Catholic church has so much dedicated.

Malcolm Collins: I'm actually being proselytized to by a Catholic. I'm just thinking about it now. That's what I'm saying.

Simone Collins: 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 it's caused resources that 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, etc.

Malcolm Collins: I have two other ideas I've come up while you've been [00:32:00] talking here.

Simone Collins: 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 aesthetic idealists.

Like they really like, This grandeur feeling this everything it's 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 sealing 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 [00:33:00] 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.

Simone Collins: Oh, and so these, 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 calling. Contrast like

Malcolm Collins: a young Jew, or a young Mormon, right? I go to my rabbi and I talk about dating problems, or finding a wife, or something like that. Or I go to a Mormon. A stake president, or

Simone Collins: yeah, whoever. Yeah. Yeah, they're gonna probably have a family and a ton of kids.

They're gonna

Malcolm Collins: be able to talk from a position of not sympathy, but empathy. Really, some people don't know the difference. Empathy is when you're talking about an [00:34:00] 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've got it mixed up. I got it mixed up. It's the empathy is one and the empathy is the other. Yeah it's the same word. Simone is the smarter one, and you're proving it again right here. I'm probably wrong, Malcolm. I just 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 A couple things.

Okay. No, so I think you

Simone Collins: 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. It'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, you can end up married.

Malcolm Collins: Then consider like we've got to, we've got to flip this consider how this is actually protective of the aesthetic idealism problem I was talking about. So when you go to a, [00:35:00] 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 this area.

They're going to 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

Simone Collins: Yeah, or you can talk to a nun.

She's basically married to Jesus. That's a high bar. She's comparing all men to Jesus. Yeah, she's

Malcolm Collins: 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, okay?

Your fanatics are the people who in a normal religion are pumping out the most kids. In Catholicism, you're memetically castrating them. Your most devout members are entering the priesthood.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Rather they serve their

Malcolm Collins: [00:36:00] duty to God 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. Two 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 [00:37:00] they read like research abstracts. Like it's it's it's the difference between a 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 you know If you look at like the pre millennialist versus the post millennialist Protestants, and you look at them debating this is a living conversation.

Even if it's like nuanced stuff they are passion 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.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so it's, how can you bring that passion back in?

I think it's by Doubling down on the asceticism, but the asceticism of the old and the ascetic not asceticism like being an ascetic, but the ascetic drive or [00:38:00] 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.

Simone Collins: 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.

Malcolm Collins: 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 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 is 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. [00:39:00] 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.

Simone Collins: Wow. That's. intense. And I, 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.

Yeah, I also feel like a lot of people maybe stepping away from the Catholic Church because of these developments, which is only going to hurt them more. And the bans aren't

Malcolm Collins: even really affecting abortion rates within your own community. Like, instead of focusing on this deontological like ethical structure to build [00:40:00] 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 rip off 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 in 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 [00:41:00] 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

Simone Collins: 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.

And I bet if they were in, and happy marriages at younger ages, Those abortions would have turned into live births, which is really sad too. So I think that's where it should be.

Malcolm Collins: Here's the real fix. Some of the Catholics that have reached out to us have [00:42:00] indicated that they live in small, all Catholic communities that are very high fertility rate and absolutely religiously zealot.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: These are the communities that will end up replacing the current Catholic church and potentially saving it. I'm super

Simone Collins: okay with that because these people we've met are awesome.

Malcolm Collins: 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 that's out of touch with them for

Simone Collins: sure.

It's

Malcolm Collins: 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 mandates. Yeah, I think what we really need to see is a Catholic break off church. I think that's what's gonna survive.

Simone Collins: We'll see.

Malcolm Collins: Or an order. Oh, this would be interesting. An order. An order of nuns slash priest like Catholics that all take a vow to be high of fertility and incredibly religiously celibate. The order

Simone Collins: of families. I like it. Very cool. The order of

Malcolm Collins: [00:43:00] fecundity. Anyway I, what would you call them?

The the baby friars?

Simone Collins: No. The family order.

Malcolm Collins: I love you. I love you too, Malcolm. Have a great day. And I do hope the Catholics solve this, cause I'm worried after seeing these stats.

Simone Collins: We love you Catholics, good luck!

Malcolm Collins: We can't help, but hopefully you've worked this out on your own somehow. Trust in my BF!.

Simone Collins: You look very pretty, by the way. So do you. I know the white is better,

Malcolm Collins: I know you try hard and I

Simone Collins: looked like Dobby the house elf. And so I figured, gray

appropriate for me. All right, let's do it.

This way? Yeah. Yeah? Where are we [00:44:00] going?

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