According to natural law and Catholic moral theology, large families are the norm. But it is difficult to have such families without single-family housing. The obstacles that developers and state and city officials put in the way of building a sufficient amount of such housing is thus a major source of grave social injustice today, and something that Catholic bishops, and Catholics in general, ought to be loudly and forcefully resisting by all possible means. Nor is it enough to talk about housing in general. Again, it is housing for families, and indeed for large families, that needs the greatest emphasis. This is an area where systemic economic injustice and systemic sexual immorality help hold each other in place – the lack of such housing locking people into what Pope St. John Paul II called the “contraceptive mentality,” and the contraceptive mentality preventing people from seeing just how urgent a moral problem the lack of affordable single-family housing is.
