BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

This is a very distressing article - almost as outrageous as an AP or New York Times attack on the Church - on two counts: it views the current 'crisis' - and Church communications, in general - purely in terms of the public relations angle; what it says about the attitudes of the Church's own local communications 'experts', who appear to have bought completely the common perception (and the article writer's) that the shortcomings of Vatican communications are entirely to blame for losing the communications war, as it were.

And this, despite the fact that this WSJ writer is aware that the autonomy of the dioceses and local bishops militates against the Vatican being able to help them with positively communicating what they have to say - if they have anything positive to say - because they have to communicate it themselves.


In crisis, the Catholic Church's
response is ad hoc
by STACY MEICHTRY

April 29, 2010

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI addressed a general audience here Wednesday that included a phalanx of priests and church officials who had gathered here to hone their response to the Roman Catholic Church's burgeoning sex-abuse crisis.

"I salute those participating in the communications conference," the Pope said amid his standard greetings to pilgrim groups from around the world.

His brief message to more than 100 church spokespeople underscored a divide that has appeared in recent months: Amid allegations of priestly abuse, often sexual and against minors, the Pope has rarely engaged directly in the Church's struggle to respond publicly. That has left priests, bishops and officials world-wide grappling with how to formulate their own response.

[This is such a preposterous claim! What was the pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland but the Church's most comprehensive response ever to all the aspects of the problem? Why has everyone apparently forgotten all about that Letter which was made public only five weeks ago???? After the Pope had enunciated all that he did, other prelates simply have to pick out the appropriate passage as it applies to their local situation - and check out what is being done on the level of the local churches and the national Church in line with what the Pope spelled out.

They do not have to 'grapple' if they already have formulated their own local response on such a basis, and if they have not, then it is time they do. The Pope cannot speak for individual dioceses which are completely autonomous in their administration. Unless and until the local Church - or the victim - forwards to the CDF specific problems of sexual abuse, the CDF cannot do anything on its own. It must first be informed so it knows whether and what to investigate.]

Vatican officials who typically don't work together have formed an ad hoc group that attempts to send a consistent Church message. Dioceses in countries including Belgium and the Netherlands, meanwhile, have banded together to spur investigations into past abuses, attempting to get ahead of the scandal.

Lacking central direction, however, their strategies have been at times inconsistent or counterproductive. The Vatican public-relations team was forced to do quick damage control when the Vatican's No. 2 official linked sexual abuse of minors to homosexuality and a top Vatican preacher compared the scrutiny on the Pope to anti-Semitism. [Why, after all the explanations - or just a simple reading of the actual text said - is this misrepresentation still being made? Obviously, because endless repetition has codified it into a media factoid now crystallized into myth! Shame on Mr/Ms Meichtry for buying into and perpetrating the myth!]

In overall effect, an organization with a medieval management structure is countering a real-time, snowballing scandal of the sort that, when it involves a modern corporation, is typically met with swift crisis management and a unified message.

Even the Vatican spokesman says he has limited contact with Benedict. Rev. Federico Lombardi said this isn't a problem, though, because he communicates with the Pope mainly through advisers who "interpret his thoughts."

[A most unfortunate and ill-considered, almost thoughtless, way for Lombardi to express it. A more appropriate response would have been to say "I speak with the Pope when I have to, and when he wants me to say something specific".

First of all, I disagree about calling the Pope's associates 'advisers - simply because none of them is better equipped than he is on anything, including and especially the matter of communications.

Second, Lombardi is very much hampered by his adherence to bureaucratic hierarchy. His office is under the direct supervision of the Secretariat of State, which means in practice that Lombardi takes his orders from the Sostituto (deputy for internal affairs) Mons. Filoni - widely reputed to be among the main anti-Ratzinger elements in the Curia - or Cardinal Bertone himself.

But I will say it again: Nothing stops him from picking up the phone to Mons. Gaenswein, when he has to, to say, "May I speak to the Pope please? I need some guidance on such-and-such." He is derelict in his duty by not doing so - because surely he is aware of the loyalties involved.

And although no one doubts Cardinal Bertone's loyalty, he has shown a singular talent for: a) not taking any frontline position in standing up for the Pope at critical times, and b) saying something inopportune and muddling the issue when he does speak up, as he has done twice in a row in recent days (his comments on homosexuality and on priestly celibacy).

Fr. Lombardi, the Pope's interests, and therefore the Church's, are far more important than your misplaced (I think) adherence to bureaucratic seniority.]

"Certainly it's good that I know the Pope and the Pope knows me," Father Lombardi says. "But there isn't the need to meet him every day." [See? The statement I suggested would go very well with this remark!]

After the sex-abuse crisis began to rumble in November last year, Father Lombardi began to tighten up the Vatican's media operations, creating a small sex-abuse response team, including Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, and Giovanni Maria Vian, editor-in-chief of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. The officials, who traditionally worked separately, began to meet regularly and coordinate their activity. [Really? It is not apparent at all. It still looks like a one-man operation by Fr. Lombardi, who has, in fact, shown the most and the best initiatives lately by his timely responses and by his editorials on Vatican Radio - neither of which are always carried by L'Osservatore Romano, which has had a very spotty record of following the sex abuse story - certainly with none of the assiduous continuity it shows in its Page 1 coverage of the least Obama headline initiative, whether it is opposing Israel building new housing in east Jerusalem, or his various arms reduction moves, or attempts at financial reform - indifferently reporting speculation and wishful thinking, along with concrete developments, as news!]

They've since attempted to remake Vatican communications. The Holy See now responds to media reports daily, compared with months at times in the past. It has an overhauled Web site and a Twitter page, and has started to use politicians' spin tools, such as forging its own narrative of the crisis to diffuse critical portrayals of the Pope. [Its own narrative? Setting the facts straight - and that is all it has done so far - is not 'forging its own narrative'!]

Even before the crisis, it hired San Francisco-based Internet consultancy Meltwater to comb the Internet for news of controversial issues facing the Vatican. [That's a necessary fulltime service, which, however, I do not see why the Vatican cannot assign its own qualified team to do that! Would that be more expensive than hiring a US firm?]

To some degree, the Church's response is bound to be decentralized. Throughout the crisis, critics have called on the Pope to rapidly remove bishops who covered up for abusive priests or committed abuse themselves.

But under Church teaching, all bishops and archbishops are equal and can't meddle in other dioceses. The Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, is expected to respect other bishops' autonomy as local administrators. Benedict has the formal authority to issue orders on issues from liturgy to doctrine, but bishops decide how to implement those orders inside their dioceses. [The problem is that in some cases, as in Summmorum Pontificum, their decision has to do with not 'how to implement' but 'how not to implement' the Pope's orders - a complete refusal to comply with their duty to be 'in communion with the Successor of Peter'.]

Last week's resignation offers by three European bishops came without pressure from Benedict XVI, Vatican officials and the bishops say. [Which is to say that some erring bishops have not lost all sense of elementary decency.]

Behind the scenes for the past two years, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office in charge of defrocking sexually abusive clerics, has been considering changing a Church law to give the Pope legal grounds to swiftly remove from office bishops suspected of covering up abuse, said a person familiar with the matter.

Officials in the office remain concerned that measures that strengthen the Pope's hand could upset the traditional balance of power between popes and bishops. "Otherwise you end up reducing the figure of the Pope to a despot," the person said. [Isn't that a complete misunderstanding of the authority of the Pope and the duty of the bishops towards the Pope?]

Many in the flock are seeking more guidance, including those who attended the three-day communications conference sponsored by the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, which this year was largely given over to responses to the sex-abuse crisis.

Its participants listened to a public-relations consultant talk about crisis management at Italian companies. They heard an academic deconstruct newspaper articles about the scandal. They sat through a U.S. branding expert's talk about managing "one of the oldest and most complex brands out there." [See, it was all about the PR angle - not defining clearly what the responsibility is for the communicators themselves on their level, not at Fr. Lombardi's!]

Some expressed frustration at the lack of clear direction from the top. "Communication staff cannot communicate a clear message if Church leaders have not decided on the message in the first place," Andrew O'Connell, spokesman for the Irish religious order Presentation Brothers, said at a conference panel Tuesday. [How ironic that it should be an Irish religious who makes this comment. Has he even heard of the Pastoral Letter???]

"A crisis of management and a crisis of leadership," he said, hampers the Church's efforts to respond to critics. He included his own Top Ten list of crisis management: Avoid the drip, drip effect. Tell your own bad news. Pray. [The Vatican has nothing to do with the 'drip drip' effect, since it has no knowledge of what has been going on in the dioceses for decades about this problem. It's the local bishops who have to do all they can to find out anything that can and should be disclosed once and for all... and surely, the last thing the Church needs now is communications people pointing fingers instead of doing honorably what they ought to do.]

Others complained that the Vatican wasn't devoting enough manpower to managing the crisis. "Father Lombardi needs someone to help him," said Jozef Kovacik, spokesperson for the Slovakian Bishops Conference, speaking at a conference panel on understanding and explaining the church. Otherwise, he said, the Vatican was doomed to continue "playing defense."

[NO! All these communications 'experts' seem to think that the brunt of the communications effort should come from the Vatican - though they should know that because of diocesan autonomy, the Vatican cannot speak for the local bishops.

The bishops of Germany and Belgium have shown that they are able to speak up promptly in behalf of their local Churches, and their example should be followed. Cardinals Martin of Dublin and Brady of Armagh in Ireland are trying their best, but they are hampered by the damaging impact of the government reports on Dublin, and by Brady's own personal part in investigating one abuse case when he was a priest. The United States bishops took responsibility back in 2002, and their efforts are bearing obvious good fruit.

It is almost outrageous that these local communications people came to Rome to blame the Vatican without looking at what they themselves can and should do on their level to contribute to better communications. and more than that, better information - full and transparent.]

On Wednesday, the conference's closing day, more than 100 attendees packed into the Vatican press room to ask Father Lombardi how to respond to current media scrutiny. Calling the past two months "particularly intense," the Vatican spokesman called for "maximum transparency" in the face of the crisis to "reduce the perception that we have a secretive culture, or something to hide."

Attempts to modernize the Vatican's communications won't necessarily fix the systemic failings that led to abuse, says Barry McLoughlin, a public relations consultant who advised the U.S. Bishops Conference. For the new approach to succeed, he says, the Vatican needs to show it is willing to address these failings. "Otherwise you're just putting out fires," he says. [And how much more can the Vatican say and do 'to show it is willing to address these failings' than what the Pope and the CDF have been doing? The failings now have to be addressed specifically at the local level. How can a 'PR consultant' be so narrow-minded????]

Archbishop Celli, president of the Vatican's communication council, delivered a rare self-critique of the Church's overall response to media scrutiny Wednesday at the conference's conclusion, faulting Vatican and church officials for speaking in "canonical code." [Benedict XVI can certainly not be accused of that in any way! His Pastoral Letter to the Irish was a model of plain, straight talk that used not a bit of jargon at all. Publication of the CDF guidelines in layman's language was a step in the right direction. And Fr. Lombardi's recent statements have been equally straightforward.

It's one thing to be honest about one's failings, but to fail to see or acknowledge what one has done right is shooting yourself in the foot - and just another way of being 'politically correct', i.e., being hypocritical by seeming to be self-hypercritical! ]

"Some people have told me recently...that we're lacking a strategy of communication," he said. "I think there's some truth to this, even if there has been some recent change."

While the Pope hasn't shown a desire to direct communications [NOR SHOULD HE! His mission concerns a higher communication], he appears to have blessed the use of some modern public-relations strategies. [That is also a mis-statement. He approves of the use of all the new media themselves - not of any particular strategy, because for the Vicar of Christ, the only 'strategy' is to tell the truth and do what is right according to the Gospel, not according to a PR manual!]

"Churches and religious institutions should not hesitate to encourage educational tracks" offered by Catholic and ecclesiastical universities, he said in a talk to Italian Church officials Saturday. "May the world of social communication fully enter pastoral programs. "