Many of you have sent me a column from Matthew Parris, a well-known UK conservative writer who is also a gay atheist. Parris is scandalized by how pathetic the Church has reacted to the recent same-sex marriage vote in Ireland. He lays into Msgr. Diarmuid Martin, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, for his milquetoast response, and then expands his critique:

Even as a (gay) atheist, I wince to see the philosophical mess that religious conservatives are making of their case. Is there nobody of any intellectual stature left in our English church, or the Roman church, to frame the argument against Christianity’s slide into just going with the flow of social and cultural change? Time was — even in my time — when there were quiet, understated, sometimes quite severe men of the cloth, often wearing bifocal spectacles, who could show us moral relativists a decent fight in that eternal debate. Now there’s only the emotional witness of the ranting evangelicals, most of them pretty dim. How I miss the fine minds of bishops like Joseph Butler, who remarked drily to John Wesley: ‘Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, is an horrid thing, a very horrid thing.’

So, wearily and with a reluctance born of not even supporting the argument’s conclusion, let me restate the conservative Catholic’s only proper response to news such as that from Dublin last weekend. It is that 62 per cent in a referendum does not cause a sin in the eyes of God to cease to be a sin.

Can’t these Christians see that the moral basis of their faith cannot be sought in the pollsters’ arithmetic? What has the Irish referendum shown us? It is that a majority of people in the Republic of Ireland in 2015 do not agree with their church’s centuries-old doctrine that sexual relationships between two people of the same gender are a sin. Fine: we cannot doubt that finding. But can a preponderance of public opinion reverse the polarity between virtue and vice? Would it have occurred for a moment to Moses (let alone God) that he’d better defer to Moloch-worship because that’s what most of the Israelites wanted to do?

More:

Have some of us, in short, made the mistake of taking the church at its word? Was it always, anyway, about going with the flow? Was it always secretly about imposing the morals of the majority on the minority — so all that is necessary is to discover which way the preponderance falls?

You really should read the whole thing. When it falls to a gay atheist to make the argument that the Church ought to have been making in defense of its own principles, that tells you all you need to know about the quality of your religious leadership — and whether or not they can be counted on when the going gets rough, as it very soon will. As the archbishop’s countryman once put it, The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.

UPDATE: I took the harsher “gutless” out of the headline, and replaced it with “feckless” after a couple of readers reminded me that Abp Martin actually was alone among the Irish hierarchy in owning up to the Church’s responsibility in the abuse scandals. That doesn’t excuse his behavior here, or obviate Parris’s point — which, by the way, Parris applied to all the church leaders in Ireland and the UK — but it does make “gutless” seem overstated.