The idea that the Catholic Bishops are acting in “good faith” when they make a big deal about proposed rules requiring health plans to cover contraception is simply laughable.
I don’t think it’s fair to say “the Catholic bishops turned a blind eye to child sex abuse and thus we can ignore anything else they say” — that’s a simple ad hominem attack and is unfair and without merit. I think you need one more step — that it’s clear that the Catholic bishops don’t believe the stuff they profess to believe in and from which they claim to derive their moral judgments. As I will demonstrate, the only possibilities are that they are knowingly dishonest or simply self-deluded. Thus, if they make an argument which seems on its face to lack merit, there’s really no reason to look any further and, in particular, the argument that they are making a principled stand based on deeply held beliefs is utterly implausible.
As Catholic child sex abuse scandals have unfolded over the last twenty-odd years we’ve seen all kinds of behavior from the Catholic church that are clearly driven by temporal concerns and not any kind of morality.
Let’s make three assumptions about the Catholic hierarchy:
- Members of the hierarchy believe in an all-powerful, all-loving, just God.
- Members of the hierarchy believe that if they act morally they will be eternally rewarded.
- Members of the hierarchy believe that if they knowingly do wicked things they will be eternally punished.
(In fact, according to Church law, a candidate for bishop must be “outstanding in solid faith, good morals, piety, zeal for souls, wisdom, prudence, and human virtues, and endowed with other qualities which make him suitable to fulfill the office in question”. My emphasis on “him”.)
Now, consider the behavior of this hierarchy in reaction to cases of child sex abuse by clergy:
- Known sex abusers were reassigned — often to new positions where they could continue their abuses — and their actions covered secretly.
- Cases were settled secretly out of court (presumably for fear of bad publicity and further lawsuits).
- The hierarchy in Rome attempted to portray sex abuse as a uniquely American problem when they knew this to be false at the time.
If you like, you can replace “cases of child sex abuse by clergy” with “the extermination of Jews” (you might want to be more specific) or “the Crusades” or “the Protestant Reformation” or “the Spanish Inquisition” or any of a wide variety of similarly depressing historical incidents.
Bear in mind that all of this involved group decisions by senior clergy within the Roman Catholic Church. A bishop is a pretty senior official. If you compare the way the Catholic church handled child sex abuse scandals over a period of decades to the way Proctor & Gamble dealt with the Tylenol poisoning case, I think you’d conclude that competent capitalists make better moral decisions than Catholic clergymen.
If this isn’t enough for you, I’d like to see an example where the Church has acted against its short-term temporal interest for moral reasons. Is there some scandal where the Church announced it had uncovered some horrible misdeed, wanted to make it good, and wanted any victims of similar misdeeds of which it was not yet aware to come forward and be helped? Is there a single significant case where the Church has demonstrated that it prioritizes moral interest over temporal interest?
No, this is an organization that takes three hundred and fifty years to apologize to Galileo.
A lot of left-liberal types such as myself find Adam Smith’s “invisible hands” of the market to be less than credible as a force for good, but they certainly seem to have more runs on the board than the Catholic church, which is supposed to doing moral stuff as its full-time job.
How can one reconcile this behavior with our initial assumptions? It’s impossible. It’s really not possible to reconcile it with a single one of these assumptions (unless the God they believe in is basically willing to forgive absolutely anything including knowingly committing evil acts while believing, which based on my very limited knowledge of Catholic theology is the one single thing that Catholic theologians agree gets you sent to Hell without a saving throw).
Reductio ad absurdum, the assumptions are wrong.
It’s possible that they think they believe in these things — they might, in the comfort of an armchair, nice glass of port in hand, when it doesn’t actually matter, think they believe in this stuff — but they don’t believe it the way we believe getting slapped in the face is going to hurt. They don’t believe it the way a man who throws himself on a grenade to save his friends believes in it. They don’t flinch in the direction of morality. They don’t act morally by reflex, and they don’t act morally after careful consideration. They simply don’t act as though they believe in a just God, eternal damnation, or eternal reward. I don’t know if they’re atheists, Satanists, or simply self-deluded, but they’re undoubtedly hypocrites.