Can society be moral without Varnasrama-dharma?

Over at American Greatness is this piece on recent revelations of child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church (bolding added):

Even in a faith founded upon the notion that there is no such thing as an unforgivable sin, should the penitent be sincere, what has been occurring in the church over the past 70 years or so would surely test the mercy of Christ himself.

No need to go over the nauseating details. The Church—and clearly not just in Pennsylvania—has descended into a nest of predatory perverts, largely but not exclusively homosexual, but child-molesters all. Even worse, its upper administrative reaches, the bishops, have conducted a cover-up under the guise of “compassion” and “protecting the Church,” denying, obfuscating, and lying about the extent of the problem—even as some of them were charter members of the racket. Their sanctimony is even more sickening than the sins they concealed, if such a thing is possible.

Sexual peccadilloes have always been part of every human institution, including the Catholic Church. The priapic cleric has been a staple of creative pornography since Rabelais and de Sade, and the list of sins attributable to the popes alone would make a harlot blush. Such tales of dissipation and license fueled the animosity against the Church, especially in France, and the French Revolution’s violent destruction of the ancient regime was as much directed against the Church as it was against the monarchy. To this day, laïcité is one of the French Republic’s guiding principles, and it’s no accident that into the Gallic spiritual void left by ostracized Christianity has rushed recrudescent Islam. Satan, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.

Michael Walsh, “The Shame of the Church,” 15 Aug. 2018, American Greatness, 17 Aug. 2018 <https://amgreatness.com/. . .>

So, the above bolded text is notable for a couple of reasons. One, that maintaining celibacy on a social scale requires a culture to support it (the West doesn’t support it), and the second is that a majority of gay (as in homosexual) priests have been responsible for child molestation cases. This matters because the West now has normalized homosexual sexual behavior in society. So Western culture really makes it difficult to avoid sexual indulgence.

A part of the problem is that morality is thought of especially in the Church as a function of one’s rationality being able to keep animal appetites in check. Hence, they see morality as a function of education, not nature.

But the Vedic perspective sees morality as primarily dependent on one’s nature. Hence, the sixteenth chapter of Bhagavad-gita is a discourse on the divine and demoniac natures. Those who have a divine nature are self-controlled; those with demoniac natures are controlled by lust, anger and greed. The Church identifies the self (soul) with the mind and intelligence (rationality being the highest human faculty) whereas the Vedic tradition sees the self as existing apart from rationality.

The implications of this are that the Church (and by extension Western civilization) will prefer education as the means of making people moral with little role for social structure to play whereas Vedic civilization will prefer social norms and education as a means to train people in the conduct appropriate to their social and occupational statuses.

That is, the Vedic approach to helping people stay moral begins with acting according to one’s status in society, or losing that status if one is found unable to live up to it.

And finally, transcending one’s material conditioning is easier than changing it. That’s the lesson of Vishvamitra Muni, who was once a kshatriya but by severe austerities became a brahmana. In Krishna consciousness, one has to simply act within his true social status and hear, remember and serve Krishna favorably while avoiding sinful activity.

But because the Church identifies the self with something material, actual transcendence is out of reach for them. Hence within the Church there has been  a proliferation of “liberatoin theology” within the Church. The mixing of Church theology and the political advancement of Dalits, for example, is a toxic and spiritually degrading influence on large sections of India’s population. Similar effects have been realized in other parts of the world, such as in Latin America.

But the good news for those who have faith in Krishna but cannot at once stop sinful activity, simply by carrying on with their service, being helpful to the pure Vaishnavas, they will certainly come to the perfectional stage. (see below verse at end).

The point is to become free of sin in order to be eligible to enter the Kingdom of God, not that one gets into God’s realm without becoming free of sin, as the Christians believe.

There is no alternative to becoming sinless, and this is only possibly by uninterrupted, unmotivated, continual service to Lord Sri Krishna. The role of varnasrama is to help the soul quickly make spiritual advancement in spite of his desire for a life apart from God.

abhyāse ’py asamartho ’si
mat-karma-paramo bhava
mad-artham api karmāṇi
kurvan siddhim avāpsyasi

If you cannot practice the regulations of bhakti-yoga, then just try to work for Me, because by working for Me you will come to the perfect stage.