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	Virtue Theory and the Irish Abuse Cases By Cathleen Kaveny dotCommonweal May 22, 2009 http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=3213 Most people are virtue theorists — or rather, practitioners of virtue theory–whether they know it or not. On difficult moral questions, most people trust the judgment of those who have shown themselves to exemplify probity of mind and judgment about a thousand incidents, important and unimportant. We trust the claim that a way of life is important and good because we trust the judgment of those who are further along that way. Conversely, we do not trust, and ought not trust, those who advocate patterns of life whose destructive nature we can see for ourselves, or who have proven themselves morally deficient in important and grave respects. It's not a question of one or two mistakes–it's a question of a pattern of life. This sensible instinct to trust those whom we have reason to believe are trustworthy is what is strained in the Irish abuse cases. They raise the question: is the Church trustworthy? No polemic against the existence of God, no DaVinci Code, no evolutionary biologist, will do more to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church and its claim to discern and to proclaim truth, and to point toward a life of human flourishing, than this report will. I have friends who say that this will drain the Irish Church of Catholics in ways analogous to the draining of Catholicism from Quebec forty or fifty years ago. But then, I am pessimistic. And so is the friend in question. Any more optimistic readings of the situation?
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