'GREY RHINO EVENT': GLOBAL POPULATION DECLINE

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"This is the Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang but a Whimper." In his 1925 poem "The Hollow Men", T S Eliot heard the feeble cry of the last baby on earth.

Birth rates are plunging much faster than predicted. Countries are hitting record lows decades sooner than expected. Current trends continuing for ten more years could mean global population peaking in the 2050s at 9 billion, nearly 1.5 billion fewer than was previously estimated. The planet will still rotate but it will not be as we knew it; we have no idea what it will become but we'd better try to find out. Because no country has cracked the code to getting back above replacement levels once they drop under 2.1 births per woman.

The obvious way to start, obviously, is by making motherhood desirable, by promoting parenting in order to end abortion. But abortion, contraception and their root cause of feminism are sacred cows - even or especially in the Catholic Church.

Francis and Leo might pay lip service to the sacred nature of human life but the sacrifice of billions of babies to the god of self-interest goes on, unimpeded by homilies at Mass in the Novus Ordo and its new religion. Its priests preach on recycling and immigration instead of the Commandments, Humanae Vitae or faith in Jesus Christ, Who alone is Master of humanity and its future, on earth and in eternity.

self-explanatory

From Ian McLean QSO, writing at Bassett Brash and Hide:

New Zealand faces a grey rhino event. We now feel the impact of the NZ birth rate dropping.

Across the world it’s happening. Birth rates are well below replacement. Workforces are tightening. Populations are ageing. The cost of pensions and healthcare is rising.

 

Every country in red has a fertility rate below replacement as of 2023.

 

We in New Zealand rely heavily on immigration to staff hospitals, farms, and core services, but global competition for skilled workers is intensifying. Richer countries are scrambling for skills. Immigration can no longer be relied on to solve our problems.

The global nature of the change is obvious but unrecognised. That is called a ‘grey rhino event’.

Awareness of the impact of low fertility has risen, country by country, over the past year or so. Yet it is still almost always framed as a national problem rather than a global one. Each society sees its birth rate falling and assumes its predicament is unique. In fact, the pattern is shared across most of the world.

The global nature of the shift is obvious once seen, but rarely acknowledged.

New Zealand treats these pressures as local issues. They are not. Our future will be shaped by the global population shift, even as our own policies determine how well we adapt to it.

For much of the twentieth century, the world population grew faster each year, in exponential growth. That changed about 1964. Since then, growth has slowed steadily, driven mainly by falling birth rates rather than falling death rates.

Country by country, population growth is turning into decline. What is happening now is the mirror image of twentieth-century population growth, operating in reverse across generations.

The key measure is the Total Fertility Rate - the average number of children a woman is expected to have. A Total Fertility Rate of about 2.1 is needed for long term population stability.

 

Around two-thirds of the world’s population now live in countries below replacement fertility, including China and India. Populations in East Asia are already shrinking. So too in Europe, although some countries are partly protected by immigration. Sub-Saharan Africa remains above replacement, but there too fertility is falling.

 

Because of population momentum, total world population has yet to peak and will not do so for another 50 years or so. But momentum works both ways. Fewer babies today mean fewer mums tomorrow. If fertility stays low, decline becomes self-reinforcing.

 

 

This downturn differs from earlier population falls caused by famine, disease, or war. It is driven by social change: rising prosperity, education, urbanisation, lower child mortality, and access to contraception. It reflects women’s choices as they have gained greater control over their lives.

There are benefits. Slower growth eventually eases environmental pressure. But fewer babies today mean fewer workers tomorrow. Labour shortages emerge long before total population falls. Populations age. Pension systems and health services come under strain.

 

New Zealand already feels the first ripples. Our population still grows because of

immigration and demographic momentum, but births are well short of those needed to avoid long term decline. Skill shortages are already acute.

 

Global competition for workers will intensify. Richer countries are bidding for the same shrinking pool of talent and can outbid us for our own skilled people. We need to build the skills of our own people and then retain them, rather than rely on immigration.

 

 

Fewer young people are available to support the growing proportion of older folk. The costs of healthcare and New Zealand Superannuation are rising and increasing pressure on government finances.  

New Zealand needs a plan. No part of the existing government system is equipped to provide one. A task force is needed to develop an integrated response. We need to repeat the successful approaches of the Woodhouse Commission on ACC, and the Picot Committee’s Tomorrow’s Schools.

 

The likely elements are already clear. Productivity will have to rise through innovation and technology. Economic growth per head will need to be strong enough to sustain living standards and support an ageing society with a smaller workforce. To eventually halt population decline, the role of women needs to be enhanced and parenthood supported much better.

 

We also need to take account of the long term prospects. Because the current fertility decline is unprecedented, long‑term outcomes are hard to predict. But the projections of current trends are frightening. These projections are not forecasts but they show what happens if nothing changes.

 

Civilisation may not unravel with a bang. It may shrink generation by generation, empty cradle by empty cradle. The first ripples are already affecting New Zealand. New Zealand needs to plan for the consequences of falling global fertility.

 

Ian McLean

QSO

Rotorua

January 2026

LEO IS LYING AND THE CATHOLIC WORLD KNOWS IT

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 No, this is not AI talking. We all wish it were but in fact it's the man who's meant to be leading the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Instead, by lumping in Latter Day Saints, universalists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Uncle Tom Cobley and all with faithful Catholics, Robert Prevost (aka 'Pope Leo XIV') intends to dissolve the Mystical Body of Christ and nullify the Sacraments by inclusion of the phony imitations of other heretical sects. 

Next thing, Prevost - who by this one heretical declaration reveals himself definitively to be more of an antichrist than a pope - will be endorsing Islam as a "fellow Abrahamic faith" and at his bidding weak-minded, ill-informed Novus Ordo-ites will be reciting the Shahada.

For an arch-Modernist like Prevost this is entirely predictable, but now he's gone too far. Abused and persecuted Catholics have had enough and the worm is turning. It may help them to know that very likely Prevost is a puppet, elected by the machinations of Latin Mass abolitionist Cardinal Blase Cupich, who like +Leo and the satanic Cardinal Joseph Bernardin is a denizen of Chicago. 

These evil men have a plan. Their aim is to legitimise sodomy and demolish the priesthood by blending Catholicism with heretical sects. Their ultimate target is Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

self-explanatory

From John-Henry Westen at Lifesitenews:

Pope Leo XIV has concluded the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity by declaring that different Christian faiths are already “one.”

 

“We are one! We already are! Let us recognize it, experience it and make it visible!” Leo said in his Sunday homily on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul at the Basilica of St. Paul outside the Walls in Rome.

 

As Vatican News put it, he stressed how “different Christian religions share the same faith.” His remarks were addressed to clergymen of schismatic and heretical churches, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Anglican Communion.

 

Leo’s claim directly contradicts Catholic teaching as laid out in the Catechism of St. Pius X, according to which the Church is united by the “same faith,” “same worship,” “same law” “and in participation of the same Sacraments, under the same visible Head, the Roman Pontiff.”

 

Therefore, schismatic churches that reject the authority of the pope, such as Eastern Orthodox churches, and heretical sects such as the Anglican Communion cannot be said to be unified, or “one,” with the Catholic Church.

 

The Catechism of the Council of Trent affirms, “It is the unanimous teaching of the Fathers that this visible head is necessary to establish and preserve unity in the Church.”

 

Likewise, in the encyclical Satis Cognitum, promulgated on June 29, 1896, Leo XIII taught that Christian unity is grounded in shared faith, the sacraments, and governance. The document explicitly rejected the idea of an invisible or merely spiritual Church and affirmed that full unity requires adherence to the authority established by Christ in the Catholic Church.

 

In his Sunday homily, Leo XIV also invoked Pope Francis’ claim that the “synodal” path of the Catholic Church “is and must be ecumenical, just as the ecumenical journey is synodal.” 

 

“As we look toward the 2,000th anniversary of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus in 2033, let us commit ourselves to further developing ecumenical synodal practices and to sharing with one another who we are, what we do and what we teach,” Leo said.https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pope-leo-says-different-christian-faiths-are-already-one/?utm_source=twittercath

 

'Cardinal' 'Tucho' Fernandez: notice the satanic Bernardin cross. They're not bothering to hide it any more

And now from former Navy (O6) Captain/Chaplain, seminary instructor, and diocesan Respect Life Director Gene Thomas Gomulka - a man who generally knows what's what: 

 

Pope Paul VI reigned for fifteen years from 1963 to 1978. Toward the end of his pontificate, owing to his failing health, certain cardinals in the Roman Curia took over many of his responsibilities. Hoping to hold on to their power, they succeeded in securing the election of Venetian Cardinal Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I, whom they perceived as a weak, docile, and controllable candidate.

 

The Curia cardinals quickly discovered that they may have greatly underestimated the new pope when he began inquiring about the workings of the Vatican Bank which owned many shares in the failed Banco Ambrosiano. According to confidential sources, certain Curia cardinals were very disrespectful toward him and did not wish to relinquish the power they achieved under Paul VI.

 

Feeling emotionally isolated and under a lot of stress, Pope John Paul I, who had prior circulatory issues, died after only 33 days in office. While my inside Vatican sources do not believe the pope was murdered, they do believe power–hungry Curia cardinals contributed to his heart attack.

 

After having covered the election of Pope John Paul I in Rome as an accredited member of the press, and after being invited by Pope John Paul II (whom I befriended before his papal election) to distribute Communion at his inauguration Mass in St. Peter’s Square on October 22, 1978, I have my own interpretation of the election of Pope Leo XIV.

 

Just as most bishops, priests, and many seminarians knew that Cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick was a homosexual predator who abused countless seminarians and young priests, so too did U.S. and European clergy know that Pope Francis, like most of them, was also homosexual.

 

 

self-explanatory

 

Unlike homosexual popes, straight popes and bishops do not surround themselves with known homosexuals like Cardinal “Tucho” Fernádez, Monsignor Battista Ricca, and several other gay clerics. Straight bishops like retired Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin are also far less inclined to underreport or cover up abuse as Pope Francis is documented to have done in Argentina, and as Pope Leo XIV is also reported to have done in Peru.

 

During his 12-year pontificate, Pope Francis appointed 108 of the 133 cardinals who took part in the last papal conclave. Because most of the electors were homosexuals like Francis, one would expect them to elect a fellow homosexual like Leo.

 

Recall what happened in the 16th century when straight St. Pope Pius V (1556–1572) was elected following the pontificates of gay popes Leo X (1513-1521) and Julius III (1550-1555). Pius never would have been elected were it not for a large number of straight cardinal electors at the papal conclave in 1556. The presence of heterosexual electors is supported by the fact that Pius V was followed by Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85) who was reported for having had an affair that resulted in the birth of Giacomo Boncompagni in 1548.

 

Why was Robert Prevost promoted?

 

My view of the election of Robert Prevost as the first American-born pope differs considerably from that of most Catholics and journalists. To appreciate how Prevost was elected, one has to go back in time to the November 2018 meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

 

When lay Catholics were pushing for the bishops to create a lay body similar to the National Review Board to investigate bishops who engage in and cover up abuse, it was not the USCCB President, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, but Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich who addressed the bishops, telling them that Pope Francis wanted them to table the vote on the creation of a lay investigatory body, as the Pope wanted to address the problem on the international level at a February 2019 Summit in the Vatican.

 

It was also reported that the February 1, 2025, letter from Pope Francis to the U.S. Bishops criticizing President Donald Trump’s immigration policy was not composed in the Vatican, but originated in the chancery office of the Chicago Archdiocese.

 

 

Even though the majority of U.S. Catholics oppose illegal immigration and support efforts by President Trump to curb the flow of fentynal into the country, cardinals like Blase Cupich, Robert McElroy, and Joseph Tobin, known by Catholic bishops and priests to be homosexually oriented, recently issued a statement critical of our country’s foreign policy toward countries like Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland - a statement they claimed was “inspired by Pope Leo.”

 

One may question if the criticism originated with Leo in the Vatican or, actually, in Chicago, Washington, and Newark.

 

The fix is in

 

I would argue that Francis and Cupich knew that Cupich was not electable. Being born, raised, and working in the militarily, financially, and politically powerful United States was not going to gain him the votes that someone from a far less affluent country might earn. Besides, if Cupich was neither liked by his fellow U.S. bishops, nor respected and loved by the clergy and laity of his own archdiocese, how could he endear himself to the approximately 1.406 billion Catholics worldwide?

 

Even though the election of Albino Luciani in 1978 didn’t work the way the manipulating cardinals had planned, it didn’t mean it could not succeed if tried again. But what “weak, docile, and controllable” cardinal might be elected who would allow himself to be just a figurehead of a pope while Cupich held the real power?

 

While almost all of the voting members of the College of Cardinals were beholden to Francis, they did not attribute their appointment to Cupich. This led Francis and Cupich to go to “Plan B,” which involved Cupich promoting a bishop to cardinal who would then be endorsed as Francis’ successor.

 

It seems to me that Pope Francis approved Cupich’s recommendation that the American-born Bishop of Chiclayo, Robert Prevost, born and raised in Chicago, be appointed the Prefect for the Dicastery for Bishops, a position that would lead him to be named a cardinal who could participate in the next papal election.

 

While Prevost knew Francis when they met and worked in South America, he knew that his appointment would never have been made without the endorsement of Cupich who himself served on the Dicastery for Bishops. Like many politicians controlled by billionaires who may have funded their election campaigns, so too was Prevost beholden to and controlled by Cupich, without whom he would still be back in his small Peruvian diocese.

 

 

Prevost wears the Bernardin cross too: 'weak, docile and controllable' 

 

It was no surprise that Cupich got himself appointed to the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State which oversees the city-state’s government, security, and museums. Such a position can help cover up the fact that Cupich is the real Don of the Lavender Mafia controlling the Church.

 

While serving on the Dicastery for Bishops, Cupich has promoted several homosexual friends like New York Archbishop Ron Hicks, and he will now be promoting even more homosexuals, especially in Africa and Asia where many older straight cardinals and bishops opposed efforts to get Catholics to accept homosexual behavior with the promulgation of documents like Fiducia Supplicans.

 

As Pope Leo himself said in a September 2025 interview with Crux, the Catholic Church must “change attitudes before we ever change doctrine,” specifically regarding LGBTQ+ issues.

 

Slim chance of reversing decline

 

 Based on Leo’s episcopal appointments and the positions he has taken on gays, lesbians, and transgenders; illegal immigration, the environment, and his failure to discipline over 160 bishops credibly accused of abusing children and vulnerable adults as documented by Bishop Accountability.org, one cannot expect him to deal with clerical sexual predation and homosexual misconduct or to support pro-family/pro-life Traditional Latin Mass families like Pope John Paul I might have cleaned up the Vatican’s financial corruption had he not suffered a premature death.

 

As long as homosexual popes like Leo and cardinals like Cupich continue making more homosexual cardinal electors and bishops, the chances are slim to none that a straight pope like St. Pius V may be elected, thereby reversing the ongoing decline in priestly and religious vocations and in church membership outside of Africa. 

Gene Thomas Gomulka from Gene Thomas Gomulka of John 18:37 <johneighteenthirtyseven@substack.com>

.

Gene Thomas Gomulka is a sexual abuse victims’ advocate, investigative reporter, and screenwriter. A former Navy (O6) Captain/Chaplain, seminary instructor, and diocesan Respect Life Director, Gomulka was ordained a priest for the Altoona-Johnstown diocese and later made a Prelate of Honor (Monsignor) by St. John Paul II. Email him at msgr.investigations@gmail.com.

 

BRASH WAS RIGHT: NZ NOW REWARDS MAORI GRIEVANCE

                              To comment please open your gmail account or use my email address, FB Messenger or X.

 

 Did New Zealand learn nothing from Dr Don Brash's famous 'Orewa Speech', delivered 20 years ago today? He won National an unprecedented 17-point jump in the polls but badly upset Labour's Maori activist MP Willie Jackson (which is not hard to do). 

Jackson complained then that "Maori are 380% more likely to be convicted of a crime and 200% more likely to die from heart disease and suicide. He accused Brash of 'manufacturing gross falsehoods' about Maori who, Jackson said, are paid 18% less and 34% leave school without a qualification, die earlier and suffer more."

As if non-Maori were, or are, to blame for that. But the 20 years since Orewa prove that Brash was absolutely on point. National had a sudden rush of blood to the head then, but  soon forgot their founding principles of self-reliance and anti-communism, and elected  Christopher Luxon who appears to have no principle but panders to Labour and Te Partly Maori's expectations of financial reward for self-pity. Outcomes in life have nothing to do with race but a lot to do with reliance on God.

As the old Maori proverb puts it, "I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past". But if the past is as bad as Willie Jackson asserts, that's a recipe for the train wreck Brash warned us was coming, the train which has gathered speed and come very close. And New Zealand is right in its way. 

Today is the last Tuesday of January. It is a date that should matter more in New Zealand’s political memory than it does.

 

On the last Tuesday of January in 2005, Dr Don Brash stood at the Orewa Rotary Club and delivered what remains one of the most important political speeches given in this country in modern times. It was calm, forensic, unapologetic and, most importantly, correct.

 

More than two decades on, the speech reads less like a product of its time and more like a warning that New Zealand chose to ignore.

 

Brash opened by setting out five priorities that would be familiar to anyone paying attention today. Declining relative incomes compared with Australia. An education system failing the least privileged. Welfare dependency eroding personal responsibility.

 

A justice system more concerned with offenders than victims. And finally, the issue he focused on that night, the dangerous drift toward racial separatism and the entrenchment of what he rightly called the treaty grievance industry.

 

That phrase alone was enough to end his political career. Not because it was wrong, but because it was accurate.

 

Brash was explicit about the fork in the road New Zealand was approaching. One path led toward a modern democratic society with one rule for all and equal citizenship in a single nation state.

 

Mauao belongs not to Iwi but to all New Zealanders

The other led toward a racially divided country with separate standards, separate rights and separate political structures. He argued, correctly, that the Labour government of the time was steadily moving New Zealand down the latter path.

 

The central truth of the speech was simple and deeply unfashionable. We are one country with many peoples. Not two peoples locked in a permanent power struggle where one group holds a birthright to political leverage over the other. That idea, Brash warned, was corrosive. It undermined social cohesion, democratic legitimacy and ultimately the sense of shared nationhood that had served New Zealand remarkably well by global standards.

 

He grounded his argument in history rather than mythology. He rejected the sanitised, utopian retelling of pre European New Zealand and replaced it with something far more honest. Life before colonisation was not a pastoral idyll. It was often brutal, violent and short.

 

At the same time, he refused to indulge in settler self congratulation. Greed and self interest existed on both sides. Land was taken unjustly. Injustices occurred and deserved acknowledgement.

 

But acknowledgement is not the same as perpetual grievance.

 

One of the most uncomfortable sections of the speech, and one that has aged particularly well, dealt with income and outcomes. Brash cited research showing that Māori income distribution was not fundamentally different from Pākehā income distribution. Ethnicity, he argued, explains very little about how well someone does in life.

 

The real divide was not race, but class. The bottom quarter struggled, regardless of ethnicity, and welfare dependency was the common thread.

 

That observation alone dismantles the moral foundation of race-based policy. If need is the problem, then need should be the criterion. Once race becomes the deciding factor, the system stops being about justice and starts being about politics.

 

Brash also warned about the creeping insertion of racial distinctions into law and governance. Health boards structured on ethnic lines. Education funding influenced not only by deprivation but by ancestry. Local government being reshaped to embed race as a political category. At the time, these trends were dismissed as paranoia. Today, they are openly defended as progress.

 

 

Perhaps the most profound part of the speech was Brash’s refusal to indulge in intergenerational guilt. None of us was present at the New Zealand Wars. None of us ordered land confiscations. There is a limit to how much any generation can apologise for the actions of its great-grandparents.

 

That does not deny historical wrongs. It simply recognises that a nation cannot function if its present citizens are permanently held morally liable for a past they did not create.

 

He also addressed head-on the more radical claims that sovereignty never passed to the Crown. He called them what they were. A negotiating position. Not history. Not law. Not reality.

 

What Brash feared most was not the treaty itself, but what had been built around it. A political economy of grievance that incentivised looking backwards rather than forwards. Leaders encouraged to remain in grievance mode because governments rewarded it. A country still trapped in 19th-century arguments well into the 21st century.

 

 

Doolally Greens, stuck in a time warp: Maori seats were meant to go west in 1986  

 

And yet, for all the controversy, the speech was not pessimistic. It celebrated Māori adaptability, resilience and entrepreneurial success. It acknowledged the Māori renaissance in business, culture and sport. It reminded New Zealanders that by international standards, our race relations were once genuinely good, not because of separatism, but because of shared citizenship.

 

That is what made the speech so threatening. It offered unity without denying history. Equality without erasure. Progress without grievance.

 

As someone who has voted National plenty of times in the past, I cannot help but look back at that last Tuesday of January in 2004 and feel a sense of loss. National once had a leader willing to say uncomfortable truths clearly and calmly, without slogans or spin. A leader not terrified of being called names. A leader who understood that political courage sometimes means standing alone.

 

I wish National still had a leader like Dr Brash. Someone not scared to talk the truth.

---

Now 85 years old, Don Brash is still working as hard as ever. Far from retreating into quiet retirement, he remains deeply involved with Hobson’s Pledge, continuing the fight he has waged for decades against racial separatism in New Zealand.

Matua Kahurangi <matua@substack.com>

 

Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta Pala Trinità e Sant Angela Merici (Augusto Ugolini Manerba del Garda)



St Angela Merici, pray for us