How did the Catholic church go so wrong?
A little-remembered gathering might have changed everything, a new book argues
To critics the Catholic church, which claims over 1.3bn followers, is irony incarnate. It was founded by a man who advocated poverty; yet its last pope, Benedict, wore filigree gold crosses and tailor-made shirts at several hundred dollars a pop. The Catholic church long declared homosexuality a “depravity”, yet a study published in 1990 estimated that perhaps a fifth of American priests were gay. It is run by celibate men, yet its priests find time to rule, in Latin, on everything from whether one should use condoms (non) to whether masturbation is a sin (ita vero).
What it did not find time to do was to stop the abuse of children by Catholic priests. A church founded by a man who instructed his followers to “suffer little children” is therefore now better known for making children suffer: in France alone an estimated 200,000 children were abused by priests between 1950 and 2020.
The classmates of Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who died in 2022, used to play a parlour game: who was the worst pope? Was it Sergius III, who assassinated his predecessors, or Alexander VI, who held orgies at which prepubescent boys jumped out of cakes?
Modern histories pay less attention to popes, for many reasons. Partly it is because popes matter less. It is also a matter of taste: secular, modern histories tend to focus on secular, modern powers and on rulers whose reach is geographical rather than spiritual. Popes may also be ignored because they sometimes seem so silly. They wear dresses and funny hats. They travel in a popemobile. Until relatively recently the pope’s minions included two men whose job it was to follow him and fan him with ostrich feathers.
Though Vatican's bureaucracy might not be as riveting as misbehaving medieval popes, it matters. At the heart of the book is an ecumenical council, which convened in the 1960s, at the behest of a liberal and reformist pope, John XXIII, to consider “updating” the church. It was known as Vatican II. Had it succeeded it would have revolutionised the church’s attitudes to everything from birth control to divorce, homosexuality and heresy.
It did not. John died. The reforms that followed were footling, not revolutionary. Latin mass was ditched. New musical choices were allowed. As Tom Lehrer, a satirist, observed, Catholics could now “Do whatever steps you want if/ You have cleared them with the pontiff”. Though, as Mr Lehrer said, if the church “really wants to sell the product”, its reforms should have gone further. This gripping and damning book shows how, over the course of the next five popes, they did not.
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/0...o-so-wrong
A little-remembered gathering might have changed everything, a new book argues
To critics the Catholic church, which claims over 1.3bn followers, is irony incarnate. It was founded by a man who advocated poverty; yet its last pope, Benedict, wore filigree gold crosses and tailor-made shirts at several hundred dollars a pop. The Catholic church long declared homosexuality a “depravity”, yet a study published in 1990 estimated that perhaps a fifth of American priests were gay. It is run by celibate men, yet its priests find time to rule, in Latin, on everything from whether one should use condoms (non) to whether masturbation is a sin (ita vero).
What it did not find time to do was to stop the abuse of children by Catholic priests. A church founded by a man who instructed his followers to “suffer little children” is therefore now better known for making children suffer: in France alone an estimated 200,000 children were abused by priests between 1950 and 2020.
The classmates of Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who died in 2022, used to play a parlour game: who was the worst pope? Was it Sergius III, who assassinated his predecessors, or Alexander VI, who held orgies at which prepubescent boys jumped out of cakes?
Modern histories pay less attention to popes, for many reasons. Partly it is because popes matter less. It is also a matter of taste: secular, modern histories tend to focus on secular, modern powers and on rulers whose reach is geographical rather than spiritual. Popes may also be ignored because they sometimes seem so silly. They wear dresses and funny hats. They travel in a popemobile. Until relatively recently the pope’s minions included two men whose job it was to follow him and fan him with ostrich feathers.
Though Vatican's bureaucracy might not be as riveting as misbehaving medieval popes, it matters. At the heart of the book is an ecumenical council, which convened in the 1960s, at the behest of a liberal and reformist pope, John XXIII, to consider “updating” the church. It was known as Vatican II. Had it succeeded it would have revolutionised the church’s attitudes to everything from birth control to divorce, homosexuality and heresy.
It did not. John died. The reforms that followed were footling, not revolutionary. Latin mass was ditched. New musical choices were allowed. As Tom Lehrer, a satirist, observed, Catholics could now “Do whatever steps you want if/ You have cleared them with the pontiff”. Though, as Mr Lehrer said, if the church “really wants to sell the product”, its reforms should have gone further. This gripping and damning book shows how, over the course of the next five popes, they did not.
https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/0...o-so-wrong
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
