On the very same day on which the Pontifical Urban University was opening anexhibit (see photo) dedicated to the heroic Ulma family of Poland – “this big family,” Pope Francis said, “shot by Nazi Germans during the second world war for having hidden and given aid to Jews” – in Italy the National Institute of Statistics released the figures on births and marriages in the year 2017.

Anything but “big” families, like that of those Polish martyrs or like many in Italy a century ago. The collapse of the birth rate here reached an all-time low in 2017. In a country of 60.5 million inhabitants, just 458,151 children were born last year, and even fewer, around 440,000, new births are predicted for 2018, a little more than 7 for every 1,000 inhabitants, 30 % below the average for the European Union, which is already the region with the lowest birth rate in the world.

If one considers that the “total fertility rate” that ensures zero growth, meaning a balanced turnover of the population, is 2.1 children per woman, the Italian figure has been dramatically below this for decades and in 2017 sank to the level of 1.32, with quite a few regions even more stingy with births, and with Sardinia even falling to the level of 1.06.

These are numbers that already attest to an inexorable march toward the extinction of a people.

But even more striking are the figures concerning marriage. There were 203,000 in 2016, and dropped to 191,000 in 2017, down 6% in a single year, a decrease second only to the structural one in 1975, the year following the approval of divorce in Italy.