Cardinal Pell’s babies - quantity or quality

The tenderness of Madonna with Child is for emulation, not just to render in plaster statues. Let’s have little picture books illustrated with photographs of “how to hold a baby” so that it can cuddle in, not like some object held through the crotch or grasped like shopping or food for a crocodile.

There are bad child-rearing practices to denounce - such as isolating babies from interaction with others, including using the TV as a babysitter. Outings are a great opportunity for “quality time” together, but babies and small children are often tucked into strollers that adults push from behind, with never a word or smile exchanged. This loneliness is now reaching an extreme in the new phenomenon of Baby Burkas - covering prams with coats or blankets as if the infants were parrots to be put to sleep with darkness and semi-asphyxia. And now scientists are designing robots for childcare.

There are good practices that are being forgotten, like singing lullabies and rocking and cuddling, which many parents do not know when they creep exhausted to sleep clinics. Friendliness to babies and children on outings, so that they can enjoy it together, not with the infant facing the world alone, pushed by a bent and anxious adult who seems unaware of what angel unawares they have in their pram. Talking with littlies, instead of stuffing their mouths shut with potato chips or dummies and hoping that watching TV will teach them language. It doesn’t.

The media is full of articles, often by unpracticed young mums, of the trials of caring for babies and toddlers. These need to be answered with the wisdom of the mothers who have experience in coping.

Cardinal Pell, the economics of unsustainable growth should be understood by clergy and people more in terms of human suffering rather than in fears of market forces which surely humans should be able to manage better.

There are more scriptural texts that promote real lovemaking practices with little children than there are texts commanding multiplying - which we have already done enough of anyway. Sometimes it seems as if pedophilia is, perversely, because people don’t know how to love children.

Until there is more concern about quality, concerns about the quantity of babies will just mean more juvenile suffering all round, which no theology can justify.