Religion and societal harm in Catholicism

The case that religion causes societal harm finds its richest archive in the history of the Catholic Church. The Inquisition, in its medieval, Spanish, and Roman incarnations, conducted institutional persecution over six centuries and produced the legal infrastructure that made torture and coerced confession routine in early-modern Europe. The condemnation of Galileo in 1633 became the West's foundational symbol of religious institutions arresting scientific inquiry. The Crusades enmeshed the Church in centuries of religious warfare and pogroms. Catholic colonial chaplaincies provided the spiritual scaffolding for the conquest of the Americas, including practices the Church itself now repudiates.

The twentieth and twenty-first century record adds harms that are still being adjudicated. The Magdalene laundries in Ireland and elsewhere held tens of thousands of women in coerced labor; the Mother and Baby homes (notably Tuam) became national scandals. The global clerical sexual-abuse crisis — documented by the Boston Globe Spotlight team in 2002, by national inquiries in Ireland (Ryan and Murphy reports), Australia (Royal Commission, 2017), Germany, France (CIASE/Sauvé report, 2021), and the United States (Pennsylvania grand jury, 2018) — has revealed not only thousands of perpetrators but a multi-decade institutional pattern of cover-up reaching to the highest levels of the Church. The 2021 French report estimated 330,000 victims since 1950 in France alone. Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great makes Catholic abuse a centerpiece of his case, and the empirical record has if anything outpaced his polemic since the book's 2007 publication.

Catholic responses fall into several categories. Apologists like George Weigel argue that the abuses are betrayals of the Church's own teaching and that Catholic positive contributions — the development of universities, hospitals, the modern human-rights tradition, opposition to twentieth-century totalitarianism — should weigh in any honest accounting. Critical Catholics like Garry Wills and Mary McAleese argue that the institutional structure (clericalism, mandatory celibacy, all-male hierarchy, secrecy in canon law) is itself implicated. Atheist critics from Hitchens to A.C. Grayling argue that the historical and contemporary record shows the harm is not incidental but structural, and that the Church's own moral self-evaluations have repeatedly failed to identify it without external pressure.