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Does the Catholic Church do more harm than good?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Does the Catholic Church do more harm than good?

A more general question is Does religion do more harm than good?. It will perhaps be most interesting to focus on features specific to Catholic Church. Properly dealing with the question requires some aggregation of pros and cons, but to help itemization, arguments are allowed to state a single item of harm or a single item of good and leave it to the reader to do the aggregation.

The Catholic Church does more harm than good

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Pro

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  •   Pro It does the general harm of religion: see Does religion do more harm than good?
  •   Pro Its opposition to condoms and other forms of contraception prevent limiting of spread of AIDS and prevent limitation of population growth that threatens ecosystems. Population growth in industrial countries creates load on resources (e.g. fossil fuels) for intensive agriculture and population growth in less industrial countries create load on resources (e.g. deforestation) for extensive agriculture.
  •   Pro Its involvement with 20th-century far-right dictatorships is problematic.
  •   Pro The church executed people for heresy, that is, for teachings at odds with the official Catholic doctrine. An example is the execution of Giordano Bruno. See W:List of people burned as heretics.

Con

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  •   Con It does the general good of religion: see Does religion do more harm than good?
  •   Con The Catholic Church is one of the largest charitable organizations on the planet, running hospitals, orphanages, etc.[1]

References

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  1. ↑ Catholic Church: World’s biggest charitable organization, usa.inquirer.net

See also

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Wikipedia:

Non-Wikipedia:

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