When their faces were plastered across tabloid newspapers, it prompted an outcry from politicians and social commentators dismayed at the latest example of ‘broken Britain’.
Although Alfie is not the youngest boy to have fathered a child, the extreme youth of his appearance coupled with his blatant immaturity made the photographs of him and his new family all the more shocking.
Their eyes do not reveal parental pride nor family happiness, but bewilderment, apprehension, and the fear of the responsibilities for which this couple is clearly unprepared.
The whole affair has been further aggravated by the sudden appearance of two other boys besides Alfie who are also claiming fatherhood of the tiny baby – one is 14, the other 16. This problem, however, will be easily solved by DNA testing.
What won’t be solved so easily are the emotional scars the pregnancy will leave behind. Though children are always a gift from God, Alfie and Chantelle are glaring examples of a lonely and forsaken generation. Abandoned first of all by their families, but also by a society, our society, for which the difference between right and wrong is becoming hazier by the day, and which is abandoning its young people in a moral vacuum without any help in dealing with their urges, anxieties, hopes and expectations.
In Britain a number of politicians, family charities and parenting specialists have voiced their concern. Ian Duncan Smith, the former Conservative party leader and now chairman of the Centre for Social Justice, said, “The case exemplifies the breakdown in British Society”. Linda Blair, child psychologist at Bath university, has declared, “We’ve moved ahead much faster technologically than morally, and we need to slow down. It sounds simple but there isn’t the will power. We have to teach kids more about relationships”.
David Cameron, the Tory leader, asserted that children having children was worrying, and that parenthood should not be something they should even be contemplating.
In the face of similar episodes the Church has vehemently stressed how a nihilistic and relativistic outlook has becoming entrenched in our society that has lost its grip on young people.
A couple of years ago in a message sent to members of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Pope Benedict XVI lamented a social deficit of faith, hope and love, and urged parents and community leaders to help often isolated children to choose life and truth.
“In an age of turbulence,” the Pope wrote, children “frequently lack adequate moral guidance from the adult world,” and many of them “now grow up in a society which is forgetful of God… In a world shaped by the accelerating process of globalisation, they are often exposed solely to materialistic visions of the universe, of life and human fulfilment”.
Benedict stressed that “parents, educators and community leaders… can never renounce their duty to set before children and young people the task of choosing a life project directed towards authentic happiness, one capable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, good and evil, justice and injustice, the real world and the world of virtual reality”.
The Pope concluded his message by saying that Christians must not fail “to be convinced that faith, lived out in the fullness of charity and communicated to new generations, is an essential element in the building of a better future and safeguarding international solidarity”.
Science tells us that at 12 a human being is already capable of procreating, as the story of Alfie and Chantelle has shown. But common sense also has a voice, a voice which animals cannot, nor need not, hear, but which distinguishes human beings from other creatures.
We must all fight in defence of this sound common sense which has been handed down to us from history, from tradition, and from the Church’s teachings. It is in danger of being buried for good under the heavy, oppressive tombstone of nihilism and moral relativism.
Let’s all pray, dear readers, that the voice of conscience may rise again in the hearts of more and more people in this Holy Easter season!
Updated on October 06 2016