What Is The Problem?

My friend is a liberal Protestant, and I am a liberal Catholic. He has spent much of his adult life in central America and he despairs at the rapid increase of population that he believes is an important barrier to human development. He reasons that since the Catholic Church takes a strong stand against birth control it is largely responsible for exacerbating the problem of world hunger.

I follow his logic, and on a certain obvious level it makes perfect sense. However, that argument would be much more compelling if back long ago when the world’s population was far smaller everyone had lived in the lap of plenty. Yet go back as far as you like and there have always been the poor, and they have persistently lived with injustice and hunger.

I’m not smart enough to know the consequences for humanity if sex is substantially divorced from the creation of life. However, I do believe that the main cause of poverty is not an over abundance of people, but the painful absence of love.