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 We must find our interlocutors in debate credible, and trust their basic honesty and veracity, in order to share a common moral order with…
