1 Boring Old Man

Lack of Vatican communications strategy on scandal baffles pope’s U.S. defenders
Washington Post
By Michelle Boorstein
April 11, 2010

The Vatican spokesman doesn’t regularly discuss the clergy sex-abuse scandal with the pope. Its communications council’s next meeting is in February [on the agenda: "the Internet"]. For American defenders of Pope Benedict XVI, it has been frustrating to watch an apparent lack of a communications strategy for dealing with the scandal.

"My best answer would be a primal scream," Russell Shaw, who was the U.S. bishops’ spokesman in the 1970s and ’80s, said when asked about the Vatican’s recent dealings with the public. "It reflects a totally inadequate understanding and mind-set as to the whole subject of communications."

Facing a torrent of cases in Europe and a new effort by survivors’ advocates to highlight unresolved cases around the world, members of the pope’s inner circle have said things that have only drawn more criticism, like the priest who on Good Friday compared criticism of the Church’s handling of the abuse crisis to violent anti-Semitism.

Most American organizations facing such a barrage of negative news would long ago have pulled together a crisis management team and made top officials available for interviews to explain their point of view. But the Vatican said such an approach is too commercial for the Church to adopt. "We are not a multinational enterprise, this is clear," the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said in a telephone interview. "The normal situation of the Church and the Vatican is to help the people to understand the teachings of the Church and the documents of the pope and not to sell particular products"…

So, while I’m mildly positive that they haven’t hired some PR firm to help them handle this crisis, their handling of things actually speaks to the central point of this story. They didn’t handle the reports of child abuse that piled up at the Vatican. They didn’t look at the piles and conclude anything much about the individual cases or the collection as a whole. They just kept ignoring things – pushing them to the back burner. I presume there’s not much guidance in the Cannonical Law that addresses pedophillia, so they did little unless forced, then they did too little [again]. How is our frustration about their chronically inadequate response to the pedophiles any different from "an apparent lack of a communications strategy for dealing with the scandal"? It’s a rhetorical question. There is no difference.