Stay ‘on-message’

The secular media hold no friendly disposition towards the Catholic Church, and the abuse scandal is such that the Church cannot expect sympathy from the media. What the Church may expect from them is fair and balanced coverage.

Often coverage is not balanced, for many different and sometimes interrelated reasons. These include incompetence, sensationalism, prejudice, poor research and insufficient understanding of the Catholic Church and hostility towards it, as well as righteous disgust at the scandal, exacerbated by profound shortcomings in some of the Church’s responses.

Some coverage is informed by an anti-Catholic agenda. For example, atheist campaigner Christopher Hitchens has distorted the content and objectives of the 2001 document Sacramentum sanctitatis tutela, issued by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to such an extent that to many people it represents a smoking gun for a supposed “instruction from the top” to cover up allegations of child abuse. The document in fact sought to accomplish the opposite.

Moves in Britain to have Pope Benedict arrested in September for…well, we don’t really know…suggest that the Church’s critics are not above pulling public stunts, ostensibly to highlight a scandal that already has been widely publicised.

However, it serves no purpose to refer to a concerted media conspiracy against the Church; there is no concrete proof of one, even as some publishers and journalists are aggressively anti-Catholic. Anyhow, the scandal of abuse and its cover-ups was not made up by the media. To blame the media for it amounts to an effort to divest the Church of responsibility for its own failures.

There is an apparent deficiency in communication: by the media, which fail readers when they present an incomplete story, and by the Catholic Church, which has not succeeded in conveying an adequate response.

To be sure, in many instances the Church has been treated unfairly. Temperate, intelligent, insightful and balanced Catholic voices are too often sidelined. And in some ways, that is of the Church’s own doing.

It is surprising that an institution so concerned with its own reputation should be so inexpert at putting into place a coherent public relations strategy in response to the biggest crisis it has faced since the Reformation.

As we reported last week, some in the Vatican are exasperated at the inability of Church leaders to stay “on message”. The preacher of the pontifical household, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, thoughtlessly compared the criticism levelled at the Church to “the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism” (to his credit, he later acknowledged the inappropriate nature of his remark). Cardinal Angelo Sodano’s reference to “current petty gossip” was extraordinarily imprudent, and utterly disrespectful to the real victims of the scandal — those who were abused.

In these instances, the Vatican was able to distance itself and the pope from unhelpful remarks. Matters are not helped when inopportune comments emanate from Vatican officials themselves. For example, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone’s revival of the discredited argument that links paedophilia to homosexuality merely feeds a secular perception of the Catholic Church as a scapegoating, homophobic institution that continues to blame its own failures on minorities.

It takes no public relations genius to work out just how detrimental such statements are in repairing the Church’s public reputation.

At this time, the Church should voice with humility and absolute sincerity unconditional support for the victims of abuse, account fully for its own failures, pledge to repair the immense harm done by all means necessary, and seek to set the record straight without undue self-justification.

The best advice which can be given to those who stray from that message is to just shut up.