Distrust of the Church and the Malady of Suspicion

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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

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.