You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4.

Good evening, it was a thunderous denunciation after decades of ambiguity.

A paedophile priests, the Pope said, at the end of an extraordinary summit in the Vatican,

were the tools of Satan, and what they had done was akin to child sacrifice.

Scarcely had the words been uttered than Cardinal George Pell, one of his closest

advisors and until recently third most senior official in the Catholic movement, was convicted of

sexually assaulting two choir boys in the sacristy of his cathedral after Sunday Mass.

The church's fall from grace has been vertiginous. Our credibility has been shot to pieces, said one Archbishop.

The church's critics say its moral authority has collapsed. The erosion of trust in our

institutions, whatever their qualities or their flaws, has been the central cultural narrative

in the West for nearly a century. Abedience was once seen as not just a virtue, but a duty.

Now it's ignored, if not derided in religion in education where children bunking off school to protest about climate change are applauded in politics where party rebellions over Brexit are beginning to look like anarchy is this to be celebrated an overdue recognition of the dignity, the agency, the sovereignty of the individual, or deplored as mere moral relativism that makes us self-centered and selfish, all eyes to hell with we?

Is there anything we should obey apart from our own consciences?

That's our moral maze tonight.

Our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at Edinburgh University, and the priest and polemicist, Charles Fraser. Giles, you are at Priests, I've just said, and something of a rebel, aren't you? Where do you stand? Actually, I have a surprisingly high doctrine of authority. And even though you're right,

I'm not a naturally obeying sort of person, I think it's important to have a loyalty to a moral

code that's larger than me and my individual perspective. Michael Boutanam.

I think that societies work well where parents instill values in their children, where people obey the law and respect their institutions. But even in such societies, people have inescapable personal responsibility. And it's been failures of personal conscience that have been evident recently from Hollywood to the Vatican? Melanie?

I don't like this word obedience.

It sounds to me rather like something that's iron and inflexible.

But on the other hand, I do reject the idea that the alternative to obedience is anarchy.

I think what we should be aiming for is an area where we all agree on moral authority.

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