Recently, I’ve been in a a few casual conversations and exchanges with Catholics who express a growing distrust of the Church. It isn’t isolated. This is something real in the Catholic culture. It manifests as suspicion, doubt, or an absence of trust in the Church’s guidance, teaching, or leadership. Often, it’s all three rolled into one.
But that attitude is dangerous. It disables Catholic identity, stunts growth in holiness, disfigures good Catholic attitudes (submission, docility, holiness), and ultimately amounts to an assault on the Church—whether well-intentioned or subversive—that becomes an obstacle to her missionary pilgrimage on Earth.
What’s really behind this distrust? Where did it come from—reputation, experience, something else? I think it’s rooted more in the human element than in the Church herself, and more in fiction than in fact, and often more in defiance than reasoned suspicion.
The Headlines
Every time the Church shows up in the headlines, the same reaction ripples out: See? This is why I don’t trust them. It doesn’t matter whether the story is a scandal, a policy decision, a papal remark, or a diocesan controversy (real or imagined). We’re conditioned to react rather than to receive and consider what’s happening or what’s being said
NOTE: I wrote a piece at The Forge addressing the moral and spiritual risk of being “Hooked on Headlines” Check it out some time
The most significant event thought to have caused a great deal of distrust in the Church was the clergy sex crisis that erupted in the media in 2002. Investigative reporting revealed not only cases of sexual abuse by priests, but patterns of reassignment and concealment by some bishops. Many Catholics cite this as the reason they’ve stopped attending Mass or practicing the faith in general.
Then COVID became another confirmation point. When lockdowns were imposed, the Church’s response was, in many places, limited, measured, or non-existent. There were scattered efforts at ministry in certain parishes and dioceses—sometimes even in secret. But broadly speaking, the Church accepted the restrictions, even when churches remained closed longer than other public spaces. For many Catholics—my family among them—that felt like a letdown and abandonment during one of the most vulnerable periods in living memory.
But distrust of the Church didn’t start with COVID or even the revelation of the clergy sex crisis in the early 2000s. From my perspective, it was already festering in the culture long before any of that.
Long Before the Headlines
Suspicion toward the Church was already established in the culture. You could hear it in everyday conversations, see it in movies, read it in commentary on popular history—little remarks people repeated without ever really checking them. The Church was described as absurdly wealthy, politically manipulative, historically violent, and morally suspect. Fallacious claims about the Inquisition, caricatures of the Crusades, and conspiracy theories passed around as if they were settled fact were a common part of religious discourse pertaining to the Catholic Church or the practice of the faith.
“Everybody knows the Catholic Church executed a billion Jews during the Spanish Inquisition. What’s wrong with you?!”
(Fear the “everybody-knows-isms” my friends. When “Everybody knows…” it means the people telling it to you don’t know what they’re talking about. Moving on.)
Most of the rumors and rhetoric weren’t carefully examined, and because “everybody knows…” nobody questioned or challenged them. They didn’t need to be challenged. They confirmed what many people already wanted to believe: the crazy Catholic Church just can’t be trusted or taken seriously. Even as a young teenager just getting into apologetics, I spent more time saying, “I’m sorry” for the Spanish Inquisition than, “Hold on, back up a minute!…”
In many cases, distrust of the Church didn’t begin with evidence. Evidence was gathered—or invented—to fit the preconfigured conclusion of the Church’s untrustworthiness and lack of competence as a moral voice and guide. This evidence gathering was essentially cherry-picking historical distortions, granting uncritical credibility to personal horror stories that were sometimes exaggerated in the retelling, and taking isolated failures and turning them into proof that the whole Church is corrupt.
A Necessary Clarification
At the risk of breaking cadence for a moment, let me pause and say something plainly. Some horror stories are true. Abuse, cruelty, negligence—these are real, and they matter. Most of us know at least one “bad priest” or religious. Some of us have our own stories.
But the question isn’t whether those stories exist or whether they’re valid or important. The question is what they actually prove about the Church. Individual failures—even serious ones—do not automatically define the nature, mission, or truth-claims of the Church herself. That distinction is important to point out if we’re going to think clearly instead of reactively.
From Suspicion to Agenda
Barring the aforementioned isolated incidents, distrust in the Catholic Church didn’t start with facts. It mostly started with an agenda. As the culture became progressively morally liberalized and Catholics became more secularized, it served an agenda of defiance of Church teaching, or of basic Catholic responsibilities, to disqualify the origin of that teaching—the Catholic Church.
But then real scandals broke into public view, and everything shifted. Now, being seen as an institution of perverts and enablers, the perception of the Church as lacking credibility or moral authority was confirmed. Now people had fact-based reasons to distrust the Church, even if the facts were usually distorted in the media. The clergy scandal, paired with what many experienced as institutional impotence during COVID, confirmed what had been settled in the cultural mind for decades: that the Church is weak, incompetent, corrupt, and unworthy of both our fidelity and our trust.
The Unsettling Twist
But here’s the unsettling twist: what had been, for decades, an attitude of distrust of the Church in the secular culture (which included some Catholics) is now a malady in the culture of the Church. Catholics, even very devoted ones, are affected by what has long become a culturally acceptable distrust or suspicion toward the Church. We grade, or try to out-Church, the Magisterium. We rate the Holy Father. We bring secular political mindsets into the Catholic experience. We hold the Church to our subjective standards the way we might hold Congress’s feet to the fire. Much of this is prompted and conditioned by some in independent Catholic media who have something to gain by posturing as the Truth-bearers and saviors of the Church. And many tend to trust those outlets more than the Church.
Take it from me, brethren. Some of those outlets—and even a few high-profile clerics—are knowingly misleading you. Your trust in them is ill-placed. Just because they’re saying what you want to hear doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy. It means they’re accomplices in advancing distrust of the Church as she stands today, measured against an idealized vision of her past.
Here is what Catholics need to take from this. “The Church is a mess” would be a true statement no matter where or when it’s uttered across its 2,000-year history. There’s imperfection in her clergy, in her offices, in her people. But what needs to be focused on is this: is the Church competent in her mission? Is the Church trustworthy where it counts—in the salvation of souls, the formation of saints? Most definitely! And if reading that makes you doubt it, this malady may have affected you, too.
The Church isn’t perfect. There are things you and I might change if we could. But the Lord didn’t put that in front of us. What He puts in front of us is the mission to live in God’s law, to love in accord with the Gospel, to forgive with the attitude of Jesus, and to follow with trust, as the Hebrews were commanded in the days of Moses. That isn’t blind trust; it’s true faith
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Relevant Links
This is at StE’s sister site, The Forge (also by me)
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