Today at noon, I crossed the street from my office to attend Ash Wednesday mass at the Cathedral of our Lady of Peace in downtown Honolulu. During the homily The Most Reverend Larry Silva, Bishop of the Diocese of Honolulu, admonished the people of his diocese for being hypocrites for calling themselves Catholics while also using or supporting things like contraception, abortion, and gay marriage. Apparently, we are all hypocrites because we do not follow social (not doctrinal) dictates of the US Conference of Bishops on these matters, but instead dare to reason for ourselves. Worse than that it seems that the faithful in his diocese are hypocrites because not enough of them (25 percent it seems) vote at all, if not along the lines of the Bishops’ opinions on these social issues.

It is worth noting that the message was not all negative, indeed he said this with as much level-headedness and seeming respect as he could muster and his point was that despite our hypocrisy we should all of us still bear witness to Christ’s teachings. This saving aspect of his homily kept me from storming out of the Cathedral, as I believe he was also talking indirectly about the shameful recent hypocrisies and scandals that have shaken the priesthood and the Church itself.

I sit here pondering all of this with fresh ash adorning my forehead and I feel that as a Catholic, as a progressive, and as an intellectual, I must respectfully and publically disagree with Bishop Silva on the heart of his message. I do not see progressive social views within a Catholic congregation as any sort of hypocrisy. Indeed, I believe it is a monumental testament to the faithfulness of progressive Catholics to the gospel that has kept them from abandoning the Catholic Church for want of more enlightened leaders. It is not hypocrisy, for example, to maintain one’s faith in spite of having Church leaders who are deaf, blind, or willfully ignorant of the financial plight and societal suffering that can be brought on by having too many unplanned children.

My life-partner and I are Roman Catholic and thanks to contraception we have been able to control the number of beautiful children that we bring into our family. To be sure, there is enough love to go around for as many children as might come along, but there is not even close to enough resources. It seems that if the Bishop(s) had his (their) way, after more than five years of marriage we probably should have five children with another on the way. The reality of this would mean only one of us could actually have a job, when we currently need both of our professional salaries to just barely make it in this state with a townhome, transportation, child care for one, and paying down (not off) student loans.

So, in reality, what would it mean for congregations or society at large (as they insist we should vote for in support of their social agenda) to not have any family planning? It would mean that instead of a professional middle-class the Bishops would have people like us live just above the poverty line, we would default on pretty much all of our debt, have our home foreclosed, declare bankruptcy, and so on. Assuming of course that my wife would survive the societal/Church mandate that she bring every pregnancy to full term, by now we should have a family of seven living off of one paycheck. This would likely leave us in poor nutrition, high stress, and thus poor health (without sufficient health care since we wouldn’t be able to afford it) and no good chance for higher education for any of our children or any real hope that their generation might live a more prosperous life with even greater liberty, dignity and opportunities than we had. That is just what would happen to the middle class, for others things would be far worse.

Like most working families in this country we already live paycheck to paycheck as things are. While we are blessed to have these paychecks in this or any economy we and many other Catholics would be hard pressed to consider it a blessing to have unexpected or unplanned pregnancies of the magnitude that the Bishops insist we seemingly should have. The real effect would be socially devastating and bring untold amounts of suffering and loss of human dignity on a scale rarely seen on this earth. With a society like that, not even the government could step in to make much of a social difference since the problems would be overwhelming and the revenue and productivity of the nation would pretty much go back to pre-industrial levels as society and the economy made the necessary adjustments. Monty Python made riotous good fun of the kind of world this would result in The Meaning of Life (1983), but an actual society today living with this as the forced mandate would not be a laughing matter.

Rejecting this hopeless and pitiful possibility for us as is a personal decision, and it is important that people in our society have the freedom to engage in family planning as they see fit. It is not the result of some heartless utilitarian calculus, or liberal lasciviousness, it is common-sense and it is a principled duty to not go down a path that we know will lead to significant increases in suffering and poverty. For social conservatives in general, I would argue that they might not have fully thought about the practical consequences of actually implementing their rigid social policies nationwide. This is at least how I try to understand where they are coming from, because I believe they are good people at heart and they honestly believe they are fighting for what is right. I fear they do so, however, without taking into account the practical implications that their policies would have in the end and the tragedy they would bring. It seems to me that the US Conference of Bishops, for their part, are also either unable or unwilling to consider the consequences of their opinions on such things as birth-control and basic rational family planning. God blessed us with the intellect and the ability to plan ahead regarding everything from planting crops to controlling when we want to have a child. Failing to do the later would fly in the face of the gifts he gave us.

The very notion that we should bother listening to a bunch of (presumably) celibate old men who know nothing of the realities of raising families in today’s’ world is frankly absurd. As a Catholic, I know that am not alone in this view and that many conservative Catholics agree with this point as well. But things could conceivably change within the Church so that the leadership could to come to grips with the reality that the parishioners clearly see but that the Bishops do not.

I point to my own surname for one possible way to go about it. “LoPresti” is Sicilian surname that in Italian means “son of the priest.” It dates back to at least the 12th century when priests were allowed to have families of their own. I imagine that 800 years ago they had the common sense, based on common experience, of what it means to grow a family in their world and they could speak to this issue then without too much hypocrisy.

The Lord willing (and isn’t it thought that he tends to speak to the Bishops through their congregations anyway?), the Church will come to see the wisdom of no longer denying clergy the right to love and be loved and to grow families of their own. In this way, they might come to learn ways of talking sensibly to the people in their churches about what is right and what is wrong when it comes to growing families in ways that make sense and are in accordance with the gospel.

Without something like that, it is absurd to take them too seriously on social issues like this. Perhaps with the loving warmth of their own families they could come to grow in compassion and see the common sense of wisely planning a family that can thrive and carry Christ’s message of brotherly love into the world, rather than insisting that we all take on the unnecessarily heavy burden of families that would live on the streets hoping for handouts from institutions like the Church.

In the end, perhaps that is what the Bishops want, since that would be the obvious outcome if we actually took them seriously, so maybe they really want us to fall back into utter dependence on the Church regardless of the social costs? But that would be too clever. Instead, I suspect that they are being intellectually and spiritually dishonest with themselves by insisting on pushing their socially conservative views on family planning or even gay marriage and other wedge issues at the very real expense of working to act on issues that Christ actually talked about: like poverty, economic injustices, or the selfless care for one another and how supporting social programs truly address these sorts of priorities.

In all truthfulness, for Catholics to rely on the Church for much of anything in the way of commentary and spiritual guidance in today’s society, then the Church and its leaders would have to move sharply away from positions that demonstrate an utter detachment from the reality that faces their parishioners. Failing to do that only makes their pontificating on social issues irrelevant to genuine solutions for the future challenges that we as a Church, a society, and a species collectively face.

While this debate is in part an internal one between Catholics, the government’s recent ruling that Catholic institutions must provide family planning services to their employees has caused great ire amongst our Church’s leadership. However, the rule is indeed just and it is high time that the Church itself abandoned its indefensible stance on birth control anyway. There are numerous angles from which we can address the issue of family planning, and I limit myself here quite a bit by not addressing questions of people having a right to their own bodies or what it would really mean to force women to carry innumerable children to full-term. This can be and is a life-threatening situation in many instances.

These are not side issues, nor would they even be statistical outliers in a world where we all have to have children without family planning. What I try to do in this brief essay is to consider what my life and the lives of millions upon millions would really look like if these socially conservative Bishops (and other conservative Christian organizations) had their way. The practical result would be devastating to society, devastating to human dignity, and devastating to the future world our children would inherit. In the case of the Bishops, without children or families of their own, I do not expect they can even begin to make full sense of the visceral thrust this argument has, for the responsibility we all feel towards our children’s future is not taken lightly.

Indeed, I argue that it is precisely because we feel tremendous responsibility for the well-being of our respective families that Catholics practice family planning – in this day and age it would be irresponsible for us to do otherwise. That does not make me or any of the 98% of Catholic families hypocrites, Bishop Silva. With all due respect, what it honestly means is that neither you nor the US Conference of Bishops know what you are talking about.

About the author: Matthew S. LoPresti, Ph.D. is Chair of the Asian Studies program and Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Hawaii Pacific University. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Sierra Club’s Oahu Group, was elected to the Ewa Neighborhood Board in 2011, and ran for City Council in the District 1 special election in 2010. His academic interests are in cross-cultural philosophy of religion, Buddhist, Christian, and Yoga philosophy, and the vital role public intellectuals play in a healthy democracy. He is also a renewable energy entrepreneur and advocate for recycling and the environment.