Each time a Catholic expresses reservations about an element of popular culture we invite accusations of pearl clutching – but all people, in and outside the Church, instinctively relegate some forms of entertainment below others. Naturally, this does not mean lower-brow genres are less popular, as is obviously the case with the self-dubbed ‘True Crime Community’.

This faux congregation, which revolves around interest in real-life crimes, has mutated from healthy curiosity into a never-ending pageant of the worst human atrocities. ‘True crime’ is among the most popular categories on YouTube and TikTok, and this month one of the most popular online ‘creators’ in this realm, Eleanor Neale, will take her sold-out tour to several UK cities to share ‘fun moments’ (sic) as she mulls over murder, rape and torture with a live audience.

After her original announcement was slammed, Neale rushed to stress that all proceeds from the tour would go to charity. This is not the case with the monetised videos she built her career on. The Church does not condemn profit, and entrepreneurship is to be commended, but surely not at the moral price of trivialising recent tragedies?

Neale is hardly the first such e-celeb to delve into dubious territory. The ‘My Favourite Murder’ podcast, hosted by two American ‘comedians’, has garnered millions of followers and a lucrative Netflix deal. Then there is the seemingly relentless stream of television dramas, which have often been commissioned against the wishes of victims’ families. Shock evidently sells. But ought it?

Brushes with this grisly genre are becoming all too frequent, even for those aiming to avoid it. When recently perusing the Daily Mail archive, I was startled by a preview of a new report: ‘Ian Brady’s autobiography is revealed for the first time.’ It read: ‘The secret biography of Moors murderer Ian Brady has been publicly revealed for the first time… The 394-page file is missing the final 200 pages, which it is claimed could contain Brady’s account of 12-year-old Keith Bennett’s murder and burial in 1964.’

Of course, journalists should be free to cover the news, but where does reporting end and spectacle begin?

Brady and Hindley were jailed in 1966 for the torture and murder of three children. Over 20 years on, both also confessed to two other brutal killings. One of the most haunting aspects of the so-called Moors murderers is that the perpetrators deliberately concealed the burial sites of several victims, presumably to reap pleasure and attention from the power this gave them over desperate surviving relatives and investigators. Reade’s body was found on Saddleworth Moor in 1987. Bennett has never been found. His mother, Winnie Johnson, died aged 78 in 2012, after spending decades campaigning for Brady to reveal her late son’s burial site.

Any new information that can be gleaned from Brady’s writings should of course be immediately probed by police, but why should these evildoers be granted yet further airtime than necessary? Who is to say that Brady did not leave these suspiciously well arranged ‘lost’ writings, with details of Bennett’s resting place omitted, with the deliberate intention of boosting his posthumous infamy?

This is not to say that an academic interest in crime, and serial killers in particular, is unique to the internet age, or inherently contrary to Church teaching. It is also true that any commentary on delicate matters could spark backlash, but there are ways to do it with more decorum. Take The Smiths’ 1984 single ‘Suffer Little Children’, directly inspired by Brady and Hindley’s notorious crimes: ‘Lesley-Anne, with your pretty white beads / Oh John, you’ll never be a man / And you'll never see your home again / Oh Manchester, so much to answer for / Edward, see those alluring lights? / Tonight will be your very last night / A woman said: “I know my son is dead” / “I'll never rest my hands on his sacred head”’

It is no surprise that, despite initial reports that the victims’ relatives disliked the song, Smiths frontman Morrissey later befriended Lesley Ann Downey’s mother, Ann West.

There was nothing gratuitous about this take on those sorry events, and its lyrics expressed a fitting degree of lament. Morrissey, a lapsed Catholic, and his bandmates were raised in the Manchester backstreets where Hindley and Brady had been at large. No doubt the realisation that they could easily have wound up among the pair’s unfortunate victims impacted them greatly.

Art does not owe us comfort, but routine intimacy with violence and evil is already numbing millions of viewers to those things, pushing them to seek out ever more gruesome information – and surely not with the aim of honouring victims of these extreme crimes. In a 2015 column ‘Why I Don’t Watch Holocaust Movies’, former White House speechwriter John Podhoretz argued: ‘The very act of converting the Shoah into a story on film is a violation of its meaning, its force, and its evil.’

Can we not accuse the viewers and creators of the expanding ‘true crime’ racket of similar ‘violations’? St Thomas Aquinas squared this issue by affirming that while knowledge is a gift from the Holy Spirit, curiosity can quickly become disordered if pursued without care or purpose.

Unless there is an intention to educate, commemorate or spiritually invigorate, we must think seriously about what content should be consumed with extreme moderation, and what should be considered a peripheral offence against decency in and of itself.