Stephen Fry: The Church is very loose on moral evils, because, although they try to accuse people like me, who believe in empiricism and the Enlightenment, of what they call ‘moral relativism,’ as if it’s some appalling sin, where what it actually means is ‘thought.’ They, for example, thought that slavery was perfectly fine. Absolutely OK.
Anne Widdecombe: As did all societies of the time!
Stephen Fry: And then they didn’t. And what is the point of the Catholic Church, if it says, ‘Well, we couldn’t know better, because nobody else did’? Then what are you for?
This, to me, is part of why I’m an atheist. If there’s a God, and God is good and important, then shouldn’t we expect Churches – especially large ones that are run by people who have spent a lifetime intensely studying the question of what God wants – to be noticeably better at morality than the rest of humanity?
An hourlong video of the debate between Fry and Widdecombe (and also Christoper Hitchens and Archbishop Onaiyekan) can be viewed here. The debate is pretty good, but the moderator spent waaaay too much time on audience comments.
There seems to be a “godliness mystique” that surround people who dedicate their lives to religion. We lend them some measure of moral authority — as if they have earned it — simply because we suppose that, by having dedicated themselves to their god, they will conduct themselves noticeably better than the rest of us. Unfortunately, that assumption has no merit whatsoever. And worse, the mystique often enough results in our trusting scoundrels. It certainly needs to be debunked.
If there’s a God, and God is good and important, then shouldn’t we expect Churches – especially large ones that are run by people who have spent a lifetime intensely studying the question of what God wants – to be noticeably better at morality than the rest of humanity?
This is a non sequitur. Wherein do you see a connection? Ohio can be big and important, but that does not speak in any sense to what the characteristics of any particular college geography program will look like. All that we can predict from the data provided is that, if Ohio is big and important, and geography claims to concern itself with the study of big and important places, and the existence and nature of Ohio are susceptible to the work of geographers, then a competent geography program ought to have some mention of Ohio in it.
In fact, the converse of your presentation has more intuitive truthiness. If God is about morality, and people who do bad things but wish to do better things tend to stumble upon morality and/or God, then wouldn’t we expect that the people who busy themselves with moral questions would tend to be WORSE than the common run of humanity? Maybe the bulk of people don’t need to build elaborate systems of morality in order to get along with their neighbors and can just get on with life; it’s the wickeder folk who have to work at it. So you’d expect to see naughtier folk in ministry than out of it.
Christians of the energetic and charismatic, rather than institutional and sclerotic, school of thought will generally endorse that point of view to some degree. Christ didn’t come to save the virtuous people; they don’t need Him.
People exist on a spectrum of righteousness at different times in their lives. One person cannot rightly be quantified as righteous or wicked based on how much thought they’ve put into religion. The problem lies in trusting people because they say they are a part of X group as a shortcut instead of watching their actions and judging for yourself if they are righteous people or not.
My inner Southern Baptist just gasped out loud and spat out Romans 3:23 before I could even begin to process what you meant by that sentence. ;)
Your inner Southern Baptist (aside from being a dreadful heretic who should return to the arms of the Mother Church before its too late) should take it up with the Lord; Mark 2:17. Jesus trumps Paul, I win all the points, you have to give me one Internet. And a pony.
And you are exactly right: it is the attempt to veil oneself in unearned group virtue, to rely on other people’s reliance on stereotypes and prejudgment, that is problematic.
Believing in a God (or the FSM) is not the same as believing in Churches.
Given how gathering people into groups tends to erase scruples and amplify their worst impulses, I would argue that Churches are probably the worst places to look for more moral people.
One may believe in the existence of a supreme being, and even believe that that being somehow speaks to humans, while still recognizing that people in institutionalized groups are the ones least likely to be able to hear that being and zir moral preachings.
Robert:
If I open, say, a center for cartooning studies, I think it would be reasonable to expect that after several years, the hundred people I gather at CCS will be above-average cartoonists compared to any random hundred people gathered from elsewhere in society. If that isn’t the case, then the mission of the CCS has failed.
You say in essence, “no, no, you don’t understand, the Churches are like prisons except voluntary, they are gatherings of people who are moral failures and who are just trying to work their way up to being average, morality-wise.” In this perspective, we should praise the Church for managing to keep the Bishops, nuns and priests from all being serial killers and puppy-kickers, as would be their natural inclination.
But no large organized Church I know of – certainly not the Catholic Church or the Mormon Church – acts at all like you describe. The Popes, Bishops, Cardinals, etc., very clearly and obviously consider themselves experts on morality who are in a good position to sneer down on everyone outside the Church and tell them what they’re doing wrong. The Churches do not take a “live and let live” attitude towards those outside the Churches, nor do they believe that they have anything at all to learn, morality-wise, from those outside the Churches.
Rather, they clearly and explicitly claim that there is such a thing as an Objective Moral Truth that either comes from or is agreed with by God, and that they have special knowledge of what this Moral Truth is. Leaders of every large Church act as if they are moral leaders, with special moral insight that the rest of society should listen to.
In short, your defense of the large Churches is based on a completely fictional church, not on any church that exists in this world.
AMM, fair enough. One can believe that large structures corrupt and bring people away from God, and in that way square the idea that a morally perfect God exists, and the big Churches clearly aren’t any better at morality than everyone else.
But as I said, this is just one reason for my atheism. There are other reasons. :-p
If we are going to take slavery as one of the key points, the Catholic Church looks like a big loser, but nearly all of the abolitionist movements were Protestant. And not just in name, but similar to what you would recognize now as evangelicals. And further, in the deep roots of Christianity, it was one of the first slave religions in the Roman Empire. (It taught that slaves and kings were equal before God, which was incredibly radical at the time, though it is hard to understand how radical from our more deeply egalitarian modes of thought.). And btw I make this point as a non Christian.
Nearly all abolitionists were protestants, but it doesn’t follow from that that all protestants were abolitionists.
I’m not denying that many good people have been religious, nor that some Churches (although generally smaller ones – correct me if I’m wrong, but Protestantism doesn’t seem to be centrally organized the way Catholicism and Mormonism are) have occasionally been on the morally right side of a cause.
I’m just saying that organized Churches don’t seem to have a batting average better than other human institutions in general. Which is strange if there really is a morally perfect God who has special influence over the Churches.
“But no large organized Church I know of – certainly not the Catholic Church or the Mormon Church – acts at all like you describe.”
Surely. That’s one way we can tell they’re struggling to come up to the norm; isn’t it always the outclassed person who’s always most defensive about their relative position. You, as an advanced moral thinker, understand what they don’t – they ought to be humble that us enlightened people tolerate their puppy-kicking inclinations, but they aren’t. Instead they lecture us about proper puppy treatment, as if they didn’t have dog-eared copies of ‘Puppy Kicker Quarterly’ porno mags stuffed under their mattresses.
If I open a school for the mentally challenged, then an outside observer with a keen sense of relative intellectual endowment might expect that school’s denizens to be extremely humble and aware of how many better institutions, and better student bodies, are in play. But you wouldn’t see that in practice; instead, they would be all “I’m a Hahvahd man” and “get away, Yalie scum”.
(/gratuitousharvardjoke)
If one of the big arguments for an organized church, as an institution, is that it has special access to moral truth, then it needs to be able to demonstrate that access.
If in general, the organized church is no better or worse than the general population on moral issues, then, from a moral perspective, it’s pointless.
If in general, the organized church is worse than the general population on moral issues (which matches my understanding, and as Robert seems to be arguing), then, from a moral perspective, it’s actively harmful.
If, from a moral perspective, the church is either pointless or harmful, then the claims to divine moral guidance ring somewhat hollow.
—Myca
That analysis is static. What would be there if the church didn’t exist?
The Russian Orthodox church was notoriously venal (considerably worse than the Roman church, at least in the last few centuries), chock-full of all sorts of terrible behavior. The Bolsheviks, quite sincere in their desire to make a better world, wiped out this reactionary nest of parasitic moral degenerates.
The experiment was not a notable success in terms of producing better institutions. As it turned out, the church had been doing a pretty decent job of straightening, as best it could, the crooked timber of humanity.
A utopian paradise of good people treating each other lovingly in a rainbow-powered economy of love and unlimited Firefly episodes, is not something that just happens if only the existing bad actors and institutions would dissipate. Quite often, if not always, the existing bad actors and dreadful institutions are in fact the humanitarian and liberal and optimum-for-the-existing-conditions solutions to the previous state of affairs, which was even worse.
Robert, that the “venal” Russian Orthodox Church was not as bad as the Bolsheviks, doesn’t show that they did “a pretty decent job.” It just shows that you can be awful without being the worst person in the world. By the standards your argument implies, anyone who didn’t actually commit mass genocide could claim to be doing a “pretty decent job,” since someone out there was even worse.
Covering up and defending child rapists (to turn to an example within our lifetime) is not “optimum for the existing conditions”; it’s just evil. Because scummy rulers are replaced by also-scummy rulers does not in any way prove that non-scummy rulers would have been impossible.
But most importantly for my argument, is that if God is so powerful and good, and if the Church is really being run according to God’s desires, then the “it was optimum for the existing conditions” excuse rings hollow. Sure, you can sometimes say that about HUMANS: “How could they have known better? They were a product of their time and culture,” and so on. (It’s amazing how quickly conservatives embrace cultural relativism when it suits them).
But none of that makes sense if you’re talking about an all-good, all-wise, all-knowing, and all-powerful God, or about an institution created by and strongly influenced by said God. If God actually exists, surely God is not a product of any particular time and culture. (And yet, all the Gods that people worship throughout history certainly seem to be a product of the individual cultures. Which implies that people create God, not vice versa.)
By the way, here’s what comment writer David Lapp posted on Family Scholars earlier today:
That’s party the sort of thing I mean, when I say that Catholics (and others, when talking about their own churches) speak as if their churches have some special connection to divine truth.
I don’t think anything in the Catholic Church’s history is compatible with what David Lapp is saying here. The Catholic Church does not have any special pipeline to Truth, or to Morality. They are made up of humans who screw up as often and as badly as all other humans, except that because they’re unusually powerful humans the damages of their screw-ups have greater impact.
“Covering up and defending child rapists (to turn to an example within our lifetime) is not “optimum for the existing conditions”; it’s just evil. ”
Optimum does not imply good; it means best available. What if the best-really-possible alternative to “covering up and defending child rapist” was “child rape not a crime”?
You’re a leftist and so you believe in the perfectibility of human nature. But in reality, ‘perfection’ is rarely among the options that can be practically implemented. We usually have a set of choices which have varying degrees of evil implicit in them, of one form or another, and often the real choice is who is going to endure what kind of evil. Saying “this can’t be the best possible choice, because it’s just vile and evil” is a natural reflex, but life is choked full of differentiable choices, all of which cause harm or have moral problems.
To put it another way, which evil choice are you embracing today: to continue to live on land your ancestors stole from the Indians through genocidal murder, or to blow your own brains out in remorse and inflict unimaginable pain on the people who love you? You’re going to do one of those things or the other; living on the peacefully-acquired land of rainbows and kittens, while an attractive choice, isn’t one of the options you actually have. “Live on the genocide land” is, among the options you actually have, probably the optimum.
That doesn’t mean it can’t contain or continue evil.
I don’t say this to defend my church against the harms it has done, which have been large, or to defend the failings of any social institution to do a better job; such criticism is valid and valuable in creating pressure for improvement. And really, fuck all child rapists and their defenders. Fuck those guys.
But don’t be blind to the possibility that they may have been the best of a bad lot.
The Catholic Church’s history in regards to slavery is complicated and includes some efforts to help slaves, but is not particularly impressive. It certainly wasn’t in the forefront of abolitionism.
On the other hand, there are people who love Catholicism and who talk about the Church being the members rather than the hierarchy. I’m not a Catholic and this isn’t something I understand. Would anyone care to try explaining what’s going on with that?
The hierarchy manages the real estate holdings; the laity comprise the actual church. As with a democratic government, the people in comfy offices who regard themselves as running the show are in fact the janitorial staff, hired and fired at the whim of the people who hold the actual power.
Also as with a democratic government, those figureheads have a way of deciding that really they ARE in charge and start bossing people around. In the church, that bossing process went so far as to (mis)educate the membership about the actual distribution of power.
@16:
As usual, it’s a bit hard to see through your double-talk, but it sounds like you are saying that the laity have the actual power in the Catholic Church.
This is 99% nonsense. The laity have no power in the Catholic Church, not in law, not in theology, not in practice. The Catholic Church is a self-perpetuating oligarchy, which nominally answers to God, but definitely not to the parishioners, any more than medieval lords answered to their serfs. The only “power” the laity have is to leave the church.
The 1% non-nonsense is that if all the Catholics in the world were to leave the Church and were to pressure their governments into stopping their subsidies of it, it _might_ cause the hierarchy to rethink some positions.
Or not. They may have enough wealth to simply tighten their belts a bit and live off the interest.
Nope, though that is what (part of) the hierarchy would have you believe; congratulations on doing an excellent job of transmitting their kyriarchic manifesto.
There is an oligarchy, though it is self-evidently not self-perpetuating until they get some female priests and stop being so persnickety about celibacy. That oligarchy is no more “the Catholic Church” than the painfully callused and dry skin at my right elbow is “Robert Hayes”. It may make a legitimate claim to membership, and it certainly has some duties and authority by virtue of its location and biological function, but any claim that it is the totality is to be laughed at. I am laughing at your claim.
By the way, I rarely engage in double-talk; I call spades spades though I might beat around the bush a bit to spare someone’s feelings or to elide a weakness in my own point of view. You’ll probably have an easier time reading my graceful prose (like a limpid brook, it is) if you don’t insist on forcing it into some half-assed frame out of your own imagination. The facial reading is usually quite sufficient. So me laughing at your claim isn’t double-blinded code or some mysterious symbolic occultation; I think what you said was amusingly stupid, and I am laughing at it.
“John Henry Newman” takes care of the law and the theology aspects of your trifecta of wrong-headed denial. To observe practice, one has to immerse oneself in a parish’s life; the ones around here are more or less in a state of open warfare. But very, very polite open warfare, since we’re all brothers and sisters. I go (or more accurately, don’t go) to St. Peter’s in Monument, Colorado; where do you go?
Robert, this is really not complicated. Much as I despise Fry, his point is sound: Isn’t the point of the Church, by its own press, to offer absolute moral truth regardless of and separate from the rest of the world? And if it can’t or won’t do that, what is the point of the Church?
Part of the problem here is that, like Amp, Widdecombe and Fry are not really talking about ‘religion’ but a particular institutional Christianity which sees itself as the top-down source of an absolute and unchanging morality. That view doesn’t give much room to the peer pressure excuse.
Certainly, it’s objectively valid to note that religious institutions are made up of people, who are fallible and grow up in the same society as everyone else; but that pretty much axes the argument that those religious institutions offer timeless and unchanging truths.
BTW, the fact that Jesus no longer trumps Paul in established Christian doctrine is one of the problems, isn’t it?
“Nearly all abolitionists were protestants, but it doesn’t follow from that that all protestants were abolitionists.
I’m not denying that many good people have been religious, nor that some Churches (although generally smaller ones – correct me if I’m wrong, but Protestantism doesn’t seem to be centrally organized the way Catholicism and Mormonism are) have occasionally been on the morally right side of a cause.”
This seems to me a big understatement of the Protestant impetus behind the abolitionist movement. The abolitionist movement existed in very large part if not entirely because Protestant busybodies, inspired by their religion wouldn’t keep their own ideas about morality to themselves and insisted on threatening the entire way of doing business rather than go along with it.
If you want to critique specific churches, fine. But generalizing to all possible churches and using it as an explanation for atheism is just weird and ahistorical. Especially considering how the explicitly atheist and anti religion mass movements of the twentieth century turned out.
And please understand that I not AT ALL arguing that communism as actually practiced by real world institutions is a good argument against atheism. I’m arguing that we shouldn’t be broad brushing people we disagree with just because it is easy to do if we aren’t careful about history.
Mythago, it may or may not be complicated, but you don’t seem to get it, and I know you’re not an idjit, so I’m gonna say that it must not be all that simple.
The ‘church’s own press’ constitutes thousands of pages of varying messages. I don’t think your thumbnail is entirely without validity, but I don’t accept it as an in-brief accurate description of what the church says its role is. If you’d like to look at the church’s actual ‘press’ –
http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catechism/catechism-of-the-catholic-church/epub/index.cfm
It’s fairly involved. Pack a lunch.
The idea that timeless truth cannot be transmitted by fallible people will be problematic for, say, the math department at universities. Truths that exist, can exist whether the people teaching them are messed up or not.
I don’t know of many Christians who would take Paul over Jesus; YMMV.
@Robert, is one of those “timeless truths” that slavery is acceptable because it is condoned in the Bible, or is it that slavery is morally wrong? That the Jews are evil because they bear the collective guilt of murdering Christ, or that they are the respected ‘elder brothers’ of Christians?
The math department, I’m pretty sure, is not arguing that the department chair is infallible, that anyone who proposes mathematical theories that deviate from currently-accepted tenets is ‘mathematically relative’ and bordering on evil, nor that the core tenets of mathematics were handed down by God and are unchanging.
And you’re still not addressing Fry’s criticism of Widdecombe. Her excuse was that the Church’s view on slavery was the same as what everybody else thought at the time. Again: how can an institution that claims to hold absolute moral truth excuse failures by saying “well, everybody ELSE was doing it”? Isn’t the point of the Church to hew to absolute moral truths irrespective of what everybody else is doing?
Yes. This isn’t an argument about people, it’s an argument about doctrine.
If you retreat to, “but the doctrine comes from the people,” then, yeah, I’d agree, but that doesn’t leave much room for God. We end up with the church being nothing but a bunch of power-mad old assholes protecting child rapists and making up arbitrary rules for everyone to follow.
Which, of course, is all it really is.
So ignoring the people for the moment, the essential question seems to be, “If the church got slavery wrong, why ought we to believe that their other teachings contain special moral wisdom?” Not the people, once again, but the doctrine, the teachings.
Robert, you make reference to, “the idea that timeless truth cannot be transmitted by fallible people.” That’s not where the argument is.
The argument is over whether the stuff that the church is claiming as timeless truth is actually timeless truth, and why on earth we ought to believe them, considering the morally corrupt nature of their past ‘timeless truths.’
—Myca
@Myca, I don’t think you even need to get into ‘moral corruption’. The problem is that the Church is arguing “timeless truths” and moral absolutism. That is incompatible with Widdecombe’s argument that moral relativism is an excuse when the Church holds immoral views.
I see that as a very different argument than saying, the Church is made up of fallible people who may twist or ignore the “timeless truths”, which I think is Robert’s argument.
“how can an institution that claims to hold absolute moral truth excuse failures by saying “well, everybody ELSE was doing it”? Isn’t the point of the Church to hew to absolute moral truths irrespective of what everybody else is doing?”
Yes. And being human beings, they are going to mess up that job from time to time. “Everyone else was doing it” is not given as an excuse for failure, it is given as an explanation for failure.
Additionally, the Church does not claim to hold all absolute moral truth, although – again being human – its spokesmen have sometimes made claims stronger than they ought. It claims certain special truths through revelation. Those claims have not been about the morality of particular economic arrangements (though the Church has butted its nose in there pretty frequently) or about the treatment that majority faiths ought to accord minority (or what should happen when the roles flip).
“The argument is over whether the stuff that the church is claiming as timeless truth is actually timeless truth, and why on earth we ought to believe them, considering the morally corrupt nature of their past ‘timeless truths.’”
I thought the argument was over why the institutional Church didn’t do a better job of exemplifying good moral behavior, but if you want to start talking theodicy and the nature of God and the role of Jesus Christ in human history and eschatology, it’s all right by me. I’m not much of an expert on any of those things, though.
As for why you ought to believe them, well, I don’t think you particularly ought to. From what I understand you aren’t a religious believer in any sense of the word, so of what interest would the specific theology be to you?
If you mean a more generalized, ‘why should Catholics believe them’, the answer would be (as I understand it – again, not a theologian) that while the timeless truths are in theory accessible to human reason and prayerful inquiry, in practice many of the truths result in conclusions that humans do not like by and large. The temptation to decide that the truths arrived at through meditative thought don’t really apply is very strong. A group approach, in which many people inquire after the same things and exert a sort of spiritual peer pressure on one another, and the accumulated insight into what the timeless truths are can be propagated from one generation to the next, is thought to produce better outcomes in terms of doctrine.
This doesn’t require perfection; indeed, it assumes that imperfection is going to be part of everyone’s efforts and holds out a hope, perhaps a wistful one, that collectively we’re less dumb than we are individually. Or at least, the diversity of the community will result in some people, at least, being willing to call others on self-serving interpretations on each issue.
re the Roman Catholic Church and Slavery. You are just dead wrong about the facts. Ancient slavery in Europe had died out in RC countries by 1492. Then you have the new slavery based on race, especially in plantation societies. There is no “the church.” Dominician and Franciscan missionaries soundly condemned the enslavement of the Indians in the 1520s and 1530s–i.e., at the same time it was beginning. The current pope condemned slavery not long after. The papacy continued to condemn the slave trade and slavery repeatedly until they was eneded in the 19th century.
You can hardly blame the popes if some Catholics didn’t listen to them totally.
However, slavery in Latin American was much milder and less coercive than in Protestant countries such as the British colonies in the future USA. There is a whole series of scholarly books on this. Of course, academics love to argue, so there is no 100% agreed concensus in these books, but all agree slavery was less harsh in Catholic countries.
The point is that it is clear you have never read even one book on slavery or the Roman Catholic church. So why are you opining about a subject you know nothing about.
Yes. And being human beings, they are going to mess up that job from time to time. “Everyone else was doing it” is not given as an excuse for failure, it is given as an explanation for failure.
So when the Church says “X is moral” and X turns out to be immoral, it’s merely humans failing to pass on the universal truth; if secular society does the same, it’s moral relativism? That’s silly. It’s particularly silly given that the Church authorities are not supposed to be just like everyone else; they’re supposed to have a unique relationship to God and ability to understand and promulgate His will.
But they’re not talking about that. You’re completely forgetting that they’re Catholics – so they do believe God was born into a particular time and culture, and was a falible Man; not an all-wise, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity when He founded the Church.
Most Christians believe their Church was founded by God and you can trace the current leaders back to those appointed by Him through the Apostolic Succession. That different from say Muslims or Buddhist who don’t have a divine founding of an institution in the history of their religions. But…
No they don’t. They’re not like the Mormons, who do believe their leader can talk directly to God. Or like the Gnostics or Scientologists, where there is secret knowledge, or Judaism which has an esoteric tradition – the gospels are open to everyone. Catholics have a tradition of direct personal relationships with God.
What the Church does is maintain the Apostolic Tradition, administer the sacraments, and perform charity. That’s what it’s for. It’s not some type of radio to God which is supposed to work as the Nate Silver of morality.
@Another Alex, are you really saying that the Church does not believe that moral law is absolute and unchanging? I’m also a little confused re your comments about God – certainly however one views the concept of the Trinity, God did not come into existence with Jesus’ birth.
So when the Church says “X is moral” and X turns out to be immoral, it’s merely humans failing to pass on the universal truth; if secular society does the same, it’s moral relativism? That’s silly.
I haven’t said a word about what it is when secular society does it. Humans are fallible; all our institutions err. The president of the AFL-CIO has a driver. Fox cancelled Firefly. “So what are labor unions or TV networks for???” Well, for whatever they were for, before they fucked up.
“It’s particularly silly given that the Church authorities are not supposed to be just like everyone else; they’re supposed to have a unique relationship to God and ability to understand and promulgate His will.”
Um, no. Not even.
They do have a personal relationship to God, and an ability to understand and promulgate His will; all humans do, or can. There is nothing whatsoever unique about their relationship with God. (There is some uniqueness in the exercise of the priestly office, though that is a subject of contention in the Church today because radical Democrats like myself think that everyone has access to the priestly office – formally trained priests just have been educated specifically in fulfilling it. But you aren’t, as far as I can ascertain, talking about things like wicked priests absolving sins or things of that nature, which is what Catholics are concerned with when it comes to priestly offices.)
The one exception: the Pope, according to the Pope anyway, has been granted a particular grace by God; God cares enough about the Church and the possibility of error from a Pope so much, that He will make sure that the Pope doesn’t utter anything mortally wrong on questions of doctrine. (The Pope’s opinion on whether women should be in combat, or who’s going to take the series, or whether we should have single-payer health care, or whether slavery is right or wrong – not questions of doctrine, and not covered by the infallibility provision.
I don’t know whether I buy that, frankly. (A lot of Catholics feel the same way.) It’s a very recent innovation, by the standards of the Church. (1869, though the idea had antecedents.) But even if it’s true, it doesn’t much apply to what you’re talking about in this thread. Infallibility applies when the Pope is speaking in his role as leader of the whole church and making dogmatic pronouncements about the theological questions of the church, such as (the big example in modern times) the nature of Mary and whether she went bodily to Heaven or only in spirit. And, it is more or less the consensus of the church’s legal scholars, if the Pope makes a claim of infallibility and says something that directly contradicts Scripture, he is very probably not infallible because he is very probably not the Petrine Pope (heir to the succession from Peter) – a ringer has gotten into the machinery.
What the Church claims to have special access to, is the founding doctrines and teachings of Jesus when he was physically present on Earth and founded a religious movement of which the Church has become the institutional curator. As Alex notes, this is rather unusual for the major religions. The Muslims of course claim special knowledge of Muhammad, but specifically deny his divinity; he was a prophet akin to Elijah or John the Baptist, not a divine figure. The Jews also have prophets. There are some relatively small religions that claim the presence of a god, either in the past or in the present, but the Catholics (and their descendant Protestant sects) are the only ones in the big time.
But again, that doesn’t go to questions of economics or individual moral behavior that comes into dispute, for the most part. Jesus would tell you that you had to be kind to your slave because all men are the same in the eyes of God, but he didn’t say to keep slaves or to free them. Broadly – though again, with the fallibility of man always a weight on the performance scales – the institutional church has propagated his teachings as faithfully as they’ve known how.
The things you think we ought to be upset and alarmed about, are things that don’t upset or alarm us at all. You might want to consider the possibility that, rather than us being blind to the pointlessness of the existence of the institutional church that’s survived for two millennia of significantly worse behavior than that which is giving you the current vapors, you’re not getting it about what the Church is for.
Alex has it exactly right: “What the Church does is maintain the Apostolic Tradition, administer the sacraments, and perform charity. That’s what it’s for. It’s not some type of radio to God which is supposed to work as the Nate Silver of morality.”
I haven’t said a word about what it is when secular society does it.
Widdecombe did. You know, which was sort of the point of the original post. She didn’t excuse the Church’s failure on slavery by saying ‘the Church is made up of people, who make mistakes’ or ‘we’re better now’ or ‘the point of the Church is not to pass on moral absolutes.’ Her excuse (not explanation) was that all the Church’s friends were doing it too, so it would be unfair to expect the Church to have higher standards. Hence Fry’s question: if we can’t expect the Church to hold up eternal moral truths, regardless of whether they are popular or widespread, what’s the point of the Church?
Now, the answer to that may well be that the point of the Church is not to issue moral pronouncements, which is fine, but then “moral relativism” should not be a problem for the Church. And yet it is. Why?
You’re also conflating individual failures with institutional ones. Fry is not complaining that Pope So-and-So owned slaves despite the Church having an anti-slavery position; he’s complaining that the Church as an institution is talking out of both sides of its mouth, arguing that moral relativism is OK when it excuses the failures of the Church. That would be the equivalent of saying that it was OK for the AFL-CIO to have its officers chauffered by nonunion drivers because Fortune 500 CEOs did it too.
Also, p.s., I’m a Jew. The things that give me the vapors about the Catholic Church are way bigger than its position on, say, the infallibility of papal doctrine.