(LifeSiteNews) — The Kingship of Christ is predicated upon the need for the Christian faithful to be fruitful and multiply. Without people in the pews, any religion begins to lose her influence and whatever semblance of religiosity it once held. The Catholic Church, as a result of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and specifically the implementation of the Novus Ordo Mass, is seeing a continued decline in the birth rate. The Kingdom of Christ on earth, the Church Militant, is suffering from a crisis of the number of souls within.

If there are fewer babies, the future of Pope Paul VI’s liturgical year 1970 Novus Ordo invention (promulgated the First Sunday of Advent November 30, 1969), is very much in danger of extinction as we get nearer to the year 2060. In my opinion, it will not survive the 100-year anniversary. When I did my first Traditional Latin Mass National Survey in 2018, the birth rate among Novus Ordo women was an above the replacement level 2.3 babies per woman. The break-even number to replace the existing population fulcrum is 2.1 babies per woman. Now, just over seven years later, the birth rate for the Novus Ordo women has fallen to 1.9 babies per woman. That is just 0.2 births greater than the current U.S. birth rate of 1.7 babies per woman. It is important to know that no population subset recovers from a birth rate under 1.9 babies per woman. The fact that the Novus Ordo birth rate has fallen so precipitously should be alarming to bishops and pastors alike.

The other side of the tale is the birth rate among the Traditional Latin Mass women. In 2018, the Kloster Traditional Latin Mass National Study of 1,085 female adult TLM-preferring respondents from 16 states yielded a birth rate of 3.6 births per woman. A conservative estimate of the 2025 Traditional Latin Mass women birth rate would have to be at least 3.8 babies per woman given the enormous chasm dividing those women faithful to the Church teachings on marriage (TLM) as opposed to those who largely reject it (NOM). Then, too, the older group of women coming to the Traditional Latin Mass from the Novus Ordo Mass largely did practice contraception at some point earlier on in their marriages. Now the younger Traditional Latin Mass women growing up and getting married in the moral ethos of the traditional mindset have almost never practiced contraception. The numbers have to be rising as the older TLM women who practiced contraception for a time stop having babies and the younger TLM women replace them. If my instincts are correct, the TLM women have doubled the birth rate of their NOM preferring women 3.8 to 1.9 overall in 2025.

There does seem to be troubling news around the Western world concerning the collapse of native populations. Contraception and the “safeguard” of abortion have wreaked havoc on societies, particularly in the Western first world. Europe has only one country at a 2.1 births per woman and every other country is at or below 1.9 births per woman. Monaco is that lone country, and it only has 38,631 residents of the 750 million total. In 2023, the European Union birth rate was at a median of 1.4 births per woman. That number is astoundingly low. Catholic countries like Spain (1.1), Italy (1.2), and Portugal (1.4) give one a wide view of the crisis.

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We now have the “morning after” pill, as it is colloquially known. There are two main types: mifepristone and misoprostol. They end and eliminate an early pregnancy. These drugs murder the baby in the womb. The Church teaches that a fertilized egg is a human life. These are dangerous drugs targeting the death of the embryo and they have many serious side effects. These drugs were approved in the U.S. in the year 2000 and have been gaining in their usage. We still don’t know the long-term effects of the drugs. These drugs now preclude the need to even go to a clinic and inhibit accurate numbers of women procuring abortions.

Pat Buchanan ran for president three times from 1992 to 2000. I remember him as being the first to talk about the decline of the European birth rate. In 2001, he wrote a book entitled The Death of the West. In it he chronicled the woeful shortage of live births in nearly every Western country. His thesis included the fact that any country with a declining birth rate would endanger its cultural identity and begin to lose the ability to support its elderly population.

As I was looking over the current numbers, I was relieved to learn that (even though not a Western country) Israel has a birth rate of 2.9 babies per woman. It has a smaller sample size of 8 million Jews and 2 million Arabs. It is the only first-world country outside the U.S. and Europe to be above water where the birth rate is concerned.

I have a priest friend who worries that I talk too much about the Traditional Latin Mass. He says I should just stay quieter and let things happen. This is much the same argument my mother used to espouse; she would say “just hide and watch.” The facts and figures around the moral sphere of where the institutional Church is headed are indeed devastating. The only reason I keep writing and preaching on this is to inform the faithful of the cliff over which we are headed, but not all of you (John 13:18). Some are the betrayers and some are the chosen.

Those who defend the Novus Ordo status quo mindset seem somewhat detached from reality. Are they really prepared to retreat to indefensible positions of mere monetary concerns and parish consolidation until there is virtually nothing left? Are they content to squander the patrimony, physical assets, and donations of so many faithful Catholics? Is it just because the Novus Ordo is their rebellion against the ancient Roman Rite, which is rooted in the blind attachment to an unrealized promise of a “reform”? Let us pray these Novus Ordo faithful, clerics, and prelates find their collective moral compass. Let us pray that adherence to the traditional mores of the Church matter more to them than petty power plays and scandalous promotions of the bureaucracy. Any ideologue is a dangerous entity to an institution, but groups of them on the inside are ruinous. The Kingship of Christ will endure in spite of them.

St. Athanasius, speaking of the Arian heresy versus the trinitarian Catholics, which was about 90% (Arian) to 10% (Catholic) in the 4th century Church, famously quipped “they have the churches, but we have the faith.” Here in the 21st century, referring to the Novus Ordo Church and sacraments versus the Vetus Ordo Church (TLM) and sacraments, we could say “they have the churches, but we have the babies.”