Conservatism reproduces by birth. Leftism reproduces by conversion. Look at almost any country. Conservatives have more children. Liberals have fewer. And yet the left does not die out. It grows. How? It takes ours. The left does not need children of its own. It needs schools, universities, big cities and screens. We raise our children for eighteen years. The university converts them in four. We do the work. They collect the harvest. So conservatism has the children and keeps losing them. This has to stop, and ideally reverse. First: stop giving them our children. This doesn’t mean hiding them from the world. It means refusing to hand them over by default. The school is not neutral. The university is not neutral. The big city is not neutral. A family that sends a child into all three unprepared is not being open-minded. It is making a donation to its opponents. Second: give the young something worth staying for. A young person doesn’t leave because the left has better arguments. He leaves because the left offers belonging and a cause, and we offer him rules. The young are critical. Good. They will not swallow dogma. The Church asks them to believe first and understand later, and most of them walk away before later arrives. We need an attractive ideological offering – ideally a religion, but one that doesn’t reject the critical minds of today’s young – not the Church with its dogma. They need a faith that survives questioning. I suggest a Religion of Life (and Fertility). The objection comes at once: invented religions fail. Comte tried a Religion of Humanity. Robespierre tried the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Soviets tried to worship the State. All dead. But look at what they worshipped: abstractions. Nobody can love Humanity. Nobody can love Reason. You can love a child. Life is not an idea you must believe in. It is something you hold in your arms at three in the morning. Fertility may or may not be in the name. Nobody has a child to improve a statistic. Fertility is the fruit, not the root… The root is a simple conviction: life is good, the future is worth inheriting, and what you received you owe forward. Believe that, and the children follow. Chase the birth rate without it, and you get Hungary: a bump, then a fall. Such a religion asks for no miracles and fears no questions. It offers the one thing the left cannot: a reason to want tomorrow. The left converts. We must convince. Better still, we must become something worth being born into. If we can’t, the children will keep leaving. And they will be right to.

Pope Leo XIV’s doctors have confirmed that the tumor removed on October 13 was a lung adenocarcinoma and that the disease was localized. Dr. Luigi Carbone and Professor Stefano Margaritora said on Wednesday evening that a subsequent oncological assessment has confirmed that “no further treatment is necessary.”