Catholic
communicators look to address scandal
By
John Thavis
Catholic
News Service
VATICAN CITY
(CNS) — With workshops such as “Benedict XVI, sexual abuse and The New
York Times” on the program, it wasn’t surprising that a conference of
Catholic communicators in Rome provoked more interest than usual this
year.
But those
expecting a round of media-bashing were disappointed. Most of the April
26 - 28 discussion focused on how the church itself should be more
transparent, more proactive in communicating and more
journalist-friendly if it wants to get its message out on clerical sex
abuse.
Sponsored by the
Opus Dei-run Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, the conference
over the years has become a regular networking event for hundreds of
church communications personnel, including diocesan spokespersons.
The new round of
disclosures on priestly sex abuse, which has taken the Vatican by
storm, has also impacted these local Catholic media professionals, most
of whom are lay people.
One might have
expected the workshop on The New York Times to have served up a welcome
scapegoat. The newspaper’s recent reporting on the sex abuse cases has
been criticized as unfair by several high church officials.
Instead, Diego
Contreras, the dean of the Holy Cross university’s communications
faculty, began the session by saying that overall, the press has had a
positive role in bringing sex abuse to light and helping make it a
priority issue for the church.
He then offered
a “just the facts” presentation. Over the past seven weeks, he said,
The New York Times has run 65 news reports on the church and sex abuse
in its print edition — including 10 on page one — as well as 12 op-ed
pieces, one editorial, one interview and 29 letters.
His statistical
analysis found that the most common “message” communicated through text
or headline was that this scandal directly affects Pope Benedict. The
impression, without always being explicitly stated, was that the pope
knew about sex abuse cases and yet said or did nothing, he said.
Contreras
concluded by saying The New York Times had clearly made a major effort
to provide information on the crisis. The problems arose, he said, in
journalistic interpretation, and in what he termed an excessive
reliance on the narrative provided by the lawyers involved in sex abuse
cases.
Rachel Donadio,
The New York Times’ Rome correspondent, afterward chatted with
Contreras and told him that while people sometimes complain that the
lawyers are driving this story, it’s very hard to get an alternative
narrative from the Vatican.
Donadio
addressed the conference the previous day, saying that covering the
Vatican was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. The Vatican,
she said, in many ways remains a “hermetic culture that doesn’t want to
be known or explained.”
Covering the sex
abuse scandal has been especially difficult, and sometimes she has felt
like a translator between different cultures, she said.
“For a while, I
felt like I was trying to explain to American readers that the pope’s
not the head of Toyota. He’s not going to give a press conference and
apologize for brake failure. This is not how the Vatican works,” she
said.
At the same
time, she said, she had to explain to some people in the Roman Curia
that “the problem of sex abuse in the church . . . is not a problem
invented by The New York Times or by anybody in the press.”
“This is an
issue within the Catholic Church, not just the press versus the
church,” she said.
Some of the most
challenging comments at the conference came from the Catholic
communicators on the program.
Pia de Solenni,
a US Catholic theologian and writer, said she was disturbed that some
church officials seemed to exhibit “a sort of tone-deafness” in their
defensive comments on sex abuse. She said it doesn’t really help the
church to describe itself as persecuted, or to say that because only a
small percentage of priests commit abuse, “we’re just about the same as
others.”
She said the
church’s message should focus on several key elements: asking
forgiveness from the victims, accountability for those who have made
mistakes and transparency in how cases have been handled.
There are good
models for this, including in the United States, but they need to be
implemented in every diocese around the world, she said.
The church also
needs to get its good news out, including the very low numbers of new
sex abuse cases being reported, de Solenni said.
Above all, she
said, the church needs to be proactive, going to media with its
information and not “waiting for the story to come and get us.”
What hurts the
communications effort on sex abuse are “conflicting and unco-ordinated
statements,” especially when they involve red herrings like
homosexuality or “cultural landmines” like the Holocaust, she said.
Although de
Solenni didn’t name names, many at the conference thought some recent
and apparently unvetted statements from Vatican officials on those very
topics had only made their jobs harder.
As close
followers of the Vatican’s communications strategy, they sympathize
with the Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, who
they correctly believe has had to overcome some internal pressures in
his campaign to publish more detailed and timely information on sex
abuse cases and policies.
On the
conference’s final day, Lombardi met with participants at the Vatican
and told them his overall strategy is based on a simple principle: that
the Vatican should provide as much information as possible in order to
“reduce the widespread impression that we have a culture of secrecy or
are trying to hide something.”
He also said
responding to the sex abuse scandal must go beyond answering
accusations by critics or the media. One fundamental task — in which
local Catholic communicators can take the lead — is to provide concrete
examples that illustrate how the church is today a model environment
for child safety, he said.
The Vatican
spokesperson received something from this audience that he hasn’t heard
in a while: a big round of applause.
Copyright
(c) 2010 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops