The Pope, the Bishops, and the Church’s Crisis of Trust, by Darrick Taylor

By Darrick Taylor, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 4, 2023

Darrick Taylor earned his PhD in History from the University of Kansas. He lives in Central Florida and teaches at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL. He also produces a podcast, Controversies in Church History, dealing with controversial episodes in the history of the Catholic Church.

Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and this includes the Catholic Church, whose leaders have done little to generate trust.

In any area of human endeavor, the testimony of others and certain types of authority are necessary to producing agreement about what is true and false, even in the realm of the natural sciences. The historian Steven Shapin argued many years ago that

knowledge is a collective good. In securing our knowledge we rely upon others, and we cannot dispense with that reliance. That means that the relations in which we have and hold our knowledge have a moral character, and the word I use to indicate that moral relation is trust. 

We must find our interlocutors in debate credible, and trust their basic honesty and veracity, in order to share a common moral order with them. Loss of trust means loss of the ability to tell true knowledge from its counterfeit, with all the confusion and chaos that implies. …..