Peace Without Poison

you perish in civil strife. Let hatred, therefore, depart from among you; let your quarrels end.Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from a wicked race, and subject it toyourselves.To preserve life, newborn life, the most precious of all lives, the Church has waged multiplewars on multiple fronts: war against sin, war against indifference, war against cruelty, waragainst ignorance. It came down hard on all those who tried to prevent or terminate pregnanciesand all those who committed infanticide, hence its rigid stance against contraceptives andabortion. For no one could argue with the logic that it is morally right to protect the unborn fromthe viciousness of the living and that it is morally wrong to sacrifice new life to indulge in carnalpleasures.And that is how the witch hunt began in 1484 when Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bullempowering the Inquisition to start “correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising” witchesfor “slaying infants yet in the mother’s womb” (abortion) and for “hindering men fromperforming the sexual act and women from conceiving” (contraception).From those dark days of fear and loathing, Europe climbed slowly towards enlightenment, but itwould not have succeeded without the efforts of the Church to control population by periodicallyincreasing the death rate, which had the effect of concentrating wealth into fewer hands afterevery pandemic of the Bubonic plague and thus of allowing the living to accrue enough excesswealth to support education, the arts and scientific research.War, the age of discovery and the conquest and settlement of new continents allowed Europe toget rid of its excess population from the 15 th to the 19 th centuries before it took the entirecontinent down with it. Europe developed and survived development by encroaching upon theland and resources of other people and displacing them to make room for Europe’s excesspopulation.By the end of the 19 th century, when no new continents remained to be discovered, Europe foundmore elegant methods to deal with its population growth; namely delayed marriage and universaleducation and this helped Europe advance faster than any other continent in its economicdevelopment, which always presupposes human development. But as medicine, nutrition, andsanitation advanced and allowed most children to survive childhood and adults to reach old agethe equilibrium between life and death was disrupted once again and the population explodedacross Europe, along with consumption, leading to resource scarcity and ultimately to two worldwars.Faced with the prospect of nuclear annihilation should it come to war again, and in light of aglobal population explosion due to the worldwide dissemination of science and technology andthe rapid industrialization of non-European nations, the world had come to a clash between finiteresources and infinite population growth and consumption patterns. Since we cannot grow the937 | P a g e