Matthew G. Gerber, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication, Baylor University
Heather L. Gerber, M.A.
Business Manager of the Department of Marketing & Communications, Baylor University
Suggested Citation:
Gerber, M. G., & Gerber, H. L. (2023). Hear the cry of the little ones: Pope Francis’s image repair discourse in response to the child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Utah Journal of Communication, 1(2), 68-77. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10055973
Abstract
The child sex abuse scandal that has engulfed the Catholic Church in the United States and abroad
is horrific and abominable on every conceivable level. It also represents an existential crisis for the
Catholic Church as an organization. The Church’s public response to the ongoing revelations of child
abuse at the hands of the clergy has been, to this point, heavily criticized for its lack of transparency,
avoidance of responsibility, and failure to account for what appears to be a cover-up at the highest
levels of the religious order. However, the recent attempts by Pope Francis to atone for the abuse
warrant investigation. Thus, the goal of this study is to begin to generate answers to the following two
research questions: first, what image repair strategies did Pope Francis employ in his public address surrounding the summit; and second, does his choice of image repair strategies reflect a change in how the Catholic Church answers accusations related to the child sex abuse scandal. We conducted a text-based analysis of the Pope’s discourse based on the typology of image repair strategies theorized by Benoit and other scholars.
Keywords: Image repair, mortification, Catholic, crisis communication, organizational legitimacy
The Catholic Church is one of the religious institutions most plagued by crisis throughout its existence. In its recent history, in the 1990s cases of sexual abuse by the Church caught the attention of the media. Most notably, in 2002, the Boston Globe shined new light on horrible abuses at the hands of Catholic clergy (Boston Globe, 2002, para. 1). The scandal also exposed the cover-up happening within the Church to protect those abusers. Pope John Paul II initially condemned the abuse and ordered investigations, but was accused posthumously of not treating the accusations seriously enough (Jones, 2023). The successor to John Paul II, Pope Benedict, apologized and further censured the abuse, but offered few strategies to combat the problem, and was also later implicated in the scandal (Westendarp, 2022). The image restoration strategies that the Church employed were highly criticized for their pervasive use of blame shifting and differentiation, or the process where “the act is distinguished from other similar but more offensive actions” (Benoit, 1997, p. 181). In 2013, after realizing that the child sex abuse scandal continued to be a global issue, the newly anointed Pope Francis started to make shifts in the crisis responses and image restoration strategies the Church chose to deploy in response to the child sex-abuse scandal. Pope Francis announced an unprecedented summit meeting, the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church, and authored a letter to the entire Catholic membership outlining the nature of the scandal and asking for forgiveness.
Many have described the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal as “the greatest public relations crisis an American religious institution has ever weathered” and “the most damaging crisis in American religious history” (Maier, 2005, p. 219; Maier & Crist, 2017, p. 164). Fading membership, dwindling donations, financial hardship and continuous cover ups all play important parts in making this one of the biggest scandals in church history (Allen, 2019; Crary, 2019; Jones, 2019; Britzky, 2018). The 1.23 billion members of the Catholic Church represent the core constituency of the organization, and if vast percentages of those members lose faith, leave the Church, or stop contributing money to the Church, the ramifications for the organization would be catastrophic. For these reasons, the Catholic Church serves as a quintessential case study of existential organizational crisis and a unique opportunity to examine how organizations attempt to restore their image amidst “wicked crises” (Maier & Crist, 2017). Thus, the goal of this study is to begin to generate answers to the following two research questions: first, what image repair strategies did Pope Francis employ in his public address surrounding the summit; and second, does his choice of image repair strategies reflect a change in how the Catholic Church answers accusations related to the child sex abuse scandal. We conducted a text-based analysis of the Pope’s discourse based on the typology of image repair strategies theorized by Benoit and other scholars.
Methods
Justification of Texts
This article examines three texts (two speeches and a letter), delivered by Pope Francis—the letter to the people of God written in December 2018, the opening statement delivered at the Vatican sexual abuse summit, and the closing statements given at the summit meeting, both in February 2019. We chose to analyze these addresses for several reasons. First, the Pope is the leader of the Catholic Church, a religion steeped in hierarchy, and one in which reverence for title is a key tenant of the faith. For Catholics, the word of the Pope is final, and is believed to be proxy for the word of God. Analyzing the official words of Pope Francis on this issue, particularly when the target audience of his discourse is (or should be) the members of the faith-organization, is central to the execution of this project. Second, these addresses are unique given their timing (centered around a long overdue Vatican sexual abuse summit), and scope (a change in the trajectory of Catholic image restoration strategies), and thus serve as a window into the ways in which discursive practices shape organizational identity and member adherence to that identity in times of crisis. Indeed, one author confirmed that the Pope’s summit address represented a “critical moment” for the Church and came at a time when “U.S. Catholics trust in the church is plummeting” (Johnson, 2019, np; Burke, 2019, np).
Coding of Texts
The following approach was used to code each of the four texts isolated in this study: Each address was examined paragraph by paragraph and coded for instances of any of the five broad categories of image restoration strategies as defined by Benoit (1997), which are denial, evasion of responsibility, reduce offensiveness, corrective action and mortification, as well as appearances of any of the underlying variants within those five broad categories of image restoration strategies. Paragraphs were coded and then categories were tallied for the frequency of image restoration strategies. Those strategies were then indicated with examples from the address to highlight the strategy discussed. Benoit’s (and others) typology of image repair strategies will be discussed in the literature review below.
Justification for Textual Analysis
Textual analysis is the most appropriate methodology for interrogating the image repair strategies used by the Catholic Church. The actual words of the Pope, the leader of the Catholic Church, are the most suitable starting point for a study of this kind. Here, we conducted a textual analysis of the image repair engaged in by Pope Francis in response to the ongoing child sex-abuse scandal that has befallen the Catholic Church. The timeframe of this study was during time months leading up to and after the monumental Vatican sexual abuse summit, roughly the two-year period of 2018-19. The words used by Pope Francis in these addresses create reality for both parishioners and clergy. As the spokesperson for the faith, the entire membership will follow suit behind what the Pope says. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest religions, with some of the more ritualistic ways of demonstrating that faith. It is important to analyze not only the discourse it utilizes but also the way in which it delivers that discourse, as Deetz (1982) explains: “The institutionalization may take place in preferred ways of talking, stories, artifacts, physical arrangement, new organizational positions, and particular ways of doing things” (p. 134).
Review of Literature
Image Repair Strategies
In order to orient the reader with the critical vocabulary that we use to analyze the image repair discourse of Pope Francis, it is necessary to operationally define those terms. The toolbox of image repair strategies includes: denial, blame-shifting, provocation, defeasibility, accident, good intentions, bolstering, minimization, differentiation, transcendence, attacking the accuser, corrective action, compensation, and mortification (Ware & Linkugel, 1973, p.275; Benoit, 1997, p.179). Rhetors who use denial seek to avoid responsibility for an offensive action or inaction by simply denying any connection to the matter in question. An offshoot of the denial strategy is blame-shifting, where the speaker blames other people or events for precipitating the objectionable act. The provocation strategy is being employed when a speaker argues that the offensive act in question was a justified outcome or response given illegitimate provocation from an external actor or event. When a public figure claims that the information needed to make an informed decision was lacking, and that this information deficit contributed to the offending act in question, they are utilizing the defeasibility strategy (Benoit, 2006, p.292). An additional image repair posture is when the speaker argues simply that the offending act in question was an accident, and was unpredictable, unavoidable, and without malevolent intent. Similarly, the good intentions strategy is characterized by the rhetor arguing that they “meant well” but forces beyond their control altered or spoiled the intended outcome (Furgerson & Benoit, 2013, p.276).
When a rhetor is able to generate goodwill with the audience and build their reputation by foregrounding efficacious deeds or accomplishments, this is referred to as bolstering. This rhetorical tactic is designed to make the audience feel better about the rhetor in question, despite being linked to an offensive act or outcome (Benoit, 2019, p.4). The strategy of minimization is designed to lessen the salience, severity, and aftermath of an offending act. In this case, the rhetor tries to depreciate and undersell the impact of the offensive action and its outcomes. Public speakers who utilize the differentiation approach typically juxtapose the current offensive situation or outcome with different, more positive acts or examples. Likewise, this strategy also entails the drawing of subtle distinctions between words, actions, or events in order to cast the rhetor in a more positive light. The transcendence strategy is intended to permit the audience to ‘go beyond’ the offensive act in question, and is typified by claims from the speaker to have used it as a “teachable moment” or promises to emerge from the situation as a ‘better person’. Sometimes, an accused rhetor will attempt to re-direct those allegations back at the original accuser(s); this tactical move to ‘flip the script’ is called attacking the accuser. This posture of rhetorical counter-attack can be public or personal, and can be “directed toward character and/or policy” (Benoit, 2017, p.2). Some speakers promise future corrective action, or point to steps that they have taken to prevent a recurrence of the offensive act or outcome. This strategy includes a wide, diverse array of actions that one might take to resolve or prevent a problem, but those actions are both constrained by the particularities of the scenario at hand, and always also aimed at saving face with a public audience. One specific type of corrective action that is included in Benoit’s typology of image repair is compensation, which is characterized by the rhetor assuming financial responsibility for damages caused the offensive act in question. This has particular relevance for the present study, for reasons which are obvious. Finally, a rhetor who seeks forgiveness and directly apologizes for the offensive act or outcome is employing the mortification strategy. For Benoit and Brinson (1994), the classic definition of mortification is a scenario wherein “the apologist accepts responsibility, acknowledges the suffering of the victims without attempting to diminish the undesirable consequences they suffered, and directly apologizes for the offensive act” (p.82).
Mortification
Mortification is a central strategy that is pervasive in all three of the texts chosen for this study. Given the deployment of this strategy by the Pope, it is important to discuss how mortification can be used to restore an organization’s image. While there may be many different audiences affected by the transgression, it is ever important for organizations to identify and prioritize the audience for its messages. According to Benoit (1997), identifying the prominent audiences is paramount and one of the key elements of persuasion. If there is more than one priority constituent group to address in an organization’s response messages to the crisis, the organization must prioritize these audiences, pacifying or appeasing the most significant one first, then dedicating time to the second audience as possible (Benoit, 1997, p. 183). Benoit also reinforced the importance of coupling appropriate corrective action with mortification, highlighting that it can be “extremely important to report plans to correct and/or prevent recurrence of the problem” (p. 184). While it will be equally important to address the elements of the misconduct, audiences will be reassured if messages contain plans to eliminate the possibility of similar abuses going forward. “A firm commitment to correct the problem – repair damage and/or prevent future problems – can be a very important component of image restoration discourse” (p. 184).
Mortification can be used to reassert legitimacy to an organization (such as the Catholic Church) after a crisis. Accepting full responsibility and fully apologizing for transgressions is key to maintaining the legitimacy of the organization, particularly in cases where the transgressions are horrendous. Making sure an organization is seen as legitimate goes hand in hand with restoring one’s image. In fact, Hearit (1995) argued that the act of apologizing “is a public response to a social legitimacy crisis, a response that seeks to distance institutional actors from their wrongdoing and reaffirm adherence to key social values” (p. 1). While an apology can seek to accept responsibility and provide reassurance that transgressions will not occur in the future, it also carries significant weight in how an organization’s membership or audiences will perceive its effectiveness and to what extent those audiences hold hostility against the organization.
Textual Analysis and Discussion
This section examines three texts by Pope Francis, all of which center around the historic Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church held in February 2019. The first text is the Pope’s ‘Letter to the People of God’, written in late August of 2018 during the lead-up to the Vatican summit. The second text is the Pope’s opening statement at the summit meeting, and, finally, the third is Pope Francis’s closing remarks. Indeed, the image restoration discourse of Pope Francis with regard to the child sex abuse scandal in the Church is characterized by many of the strategies outlined by scholars such as Benoit (1997), and the three texts I examine herein are excellent exemplars of this genre of discourse. Taken together, I argue that in these texts, the beginnings of a change in the image restoration discourse of the Catholic Church takes shape, departing from the previous “propensity for obfuscation, misdirection and, ultimately, inaction when it comes to child abuse” (Carless, 2018, para 9).
Pope Francis and the ‘Letter to the People of God’
The speech by Pope Francis, delivered from the Vatican on August 20, 2018, marked a historic occasion for many reasons, but, most importantly, I argue that this pronouncement denoted the beginning of a change in approach for the Church in terms of how it responded to the ongoing scandal. To that point, the Church had been robustly criticized for its elusiveness and outright deception with regard to the scandal. While that criticism was warranted, the image restoration strategies employed by Pope Francis in this speech are of the kind that theoretically should begin to have a galvanizing effect on the tattered organizational legitimacy of the Catholic Church and its spiraling member adherence and attendance. Critics of the letter seemed to miss the central thesis of the Pope’s argument when they called for “an apology or some form of repentance from the Pope” (Kirby, 2019, para.15).
Rather, we argue that possibly for the first time in public, Pope Francis did, in fact, engage in significant mortification, straightforward apology, and acceptance of responsibility. Pope Francis relied heavily on the mortification strategy as part of his image repair discourse in the Letter to the People of God. First, the Pope acknowledged:
“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them” (Francis, 2018, para 3).
Further, clearly acknowledging the cover-up and need for cultural change, Francis argued: “We have delayed in applying these actions and sanctions that are so necessary, yet I am confident that they will help to guarantee a greater culture of care in the present and future” (para 5). Francis also intimated: “We have realized that these wounds never disappear and that they require us forcefully to condemn these atrocities and join forces in uprooting this culture of death; these wounds never go away” (para 2). This example demonstrated deep mortification, care for the victims, and cognizance of the depth of trauma caused by the abuse. The Pope also called for fasting (mortification) and personal penance as a way to share in the communal guilt and to galvanize the believers, the Catholic parishioners, toward a future in which the Church truly exercises a zero-tolerance policy toward abuse by its priests (corrective action) (para.6).
In line with Van de Meer and Verhoeven’s (2014) work on power of emotional appeals in organizational crisis, Pope Francis tapped into the fear, guilt, shame, and anger felt by parishioners, and he harnessed their guilt to maintain loyalty to the Church. Additionally, given that audiences closely interpret events through their emotions and constituents’ feelingsabout an issue or situation act as a filter for viewing the organization and their place within it, it is important that Pope Francis also enacted and exemplified the emotions which he sought to transfer onto his audiences (Van de Meer & Verhoeven, 2014). In this address, Pope Francis went to great lengths to articulate the deep sorrow and mortification he felt. Deep mortification, or the portrayal of the organization as both responsible and regretful in the perceptions of the audience, can lead to both decreased anger and greater feelings of member identification with the leadership of the organization. When coupled with mortification strategies which entail accepting responsibility and asking forgiveness by the leaders as transgressors, the use of corrective action strategies may be particularly effective for image restoration (Benoit, 1997).
Pope Francis also advocated a move away from “clericalism” as part of the corrective action strategy employed in the Letter to the People of God. Clericalism, or the tendency within a religious organization to symbolically draw hierarchical distinctions between the leaders and the rank-and-file followers, is at the ideological center of the scandal, and the response to it. One of the central criticisms of the Church’s response to the child sex abuse scandal was its tendency to adopt this type of “circle the wagons” approach in which priests and other accused members of the clergy acted to protect each other, cover-up or minimize allegations, and generally respond as if they were “above” such transgressions. The Pope’s warnings against clericalism function as a way to reduce anger toward the priests. That is, by arguing that priests were “fallible” just like anyone else, the Pope undercut parishioners’ anger by attempting to make them feel the same shame and guilt ostensibly felt by the clerical perpetrators. AsVan de Meer and Verhoeven (2014) argued, expressions of shame or regret help to humanize perpetrators and to foster forgiveness for organizational transgressions. Additionally, the Pope argued that part of the Church’s response to the scandal will be to decrease its traditional reliance on clericalism and to end its deference to high-level leaders based on title. These statements carry great rhetorical power given that the entire symbolic structure of the Catholic Church has been based upon deference to authority.
Pope Francis Opening Statement at the Summit
The opening remarks by Pope Francis at the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church, delivered on February 21, 2019, are important to analyze from an organizational image repair perspective given that they were delivered at the “historic summit, attended by 180 Bishops and Cardinals” (Hansen 2019, para 6). We argue that the Pope’s foregrounding of the re-commitment to transparency imbued the entire Summit with a sense that the Church’s leadership was finally serious about taking genuine corrective action to grapple with the issue. Early in the speech, Pope Francis directly referred to two target audiences of the Summit speech. By stating that “the People of God look to us” for guidance through the scandal, he confirmed that the speech is not only directed toward the immediate audience, clergymen and leaders gathered for the Summit, but also to the parishioners, the believers, the church members who look to the Pope for leadership. This act of responding directly to specific publics enhances the organization’s credibility (Kauffman, 2008; Maier, 2005).
In the opening sentences, the Pope noted: “So we begin this process armed with faith and a great spirit of parrhesia, courage, and concreteness” (Pentin, 2019, para 1). This strategy is aimed directly at the immediate audience: the priests, leaders, and other members of the clergy who had heretofore been silent and evasive on the issue. Sometimes, in organizations, the discursive practice is defined and characterized by what is not said. While the layers of discursive practice, ritual, rules, scripture, and metaphor are deep and complex within the Catholic Church organization, it is also very much an organizational culture characterized by silence on certain issues such as homosexuality, reproductive rights, and of course, the issue of child sex abuse at the hands of the clergy. The use of this strategy also functioned to send a signal to the parishioners of the Church that silence and secrecy on this issue can no longer be tolerated, and that the culture of obfuscation on this topic must be abandoned, no matter how offended one’s sensibilities become when bearing witness to the graphic descriptions of abuse that have been reported.
The Pope’s address began with the use of two crisis communication approaches: mortification and corrective action. Pope Francis accessed the mortification strategy by acknowledging “the weight of the pastoral and ecclesial responsibility” that surrounds the summit gathering. Mortification strategies entail asking for forgiveness, and/or accepting responsibility for wrongdoing. He also directly identified “the scourge of sexual abuse perpetrated by ecclesiastics to the great harm of minors” as the reason for the summit. The practice of confession, accepting responsibility for one’s sins, is a key tenant of the Catholic faith and also functions as one of those structuring discursive practices that fundamentally support the faith organization. Mortification, in this instance, also functions strategically as requisite for influencing parishioner’s decisions to either adhere to the organization or to leave the Church. The failure of the Catholic leadership to admit their failings in the sex abuse crisis is a key factor in parishioners leaving the Church. The Pope had no choice but to finally accept responsibility.
Pope Francis also deployed the corrective action strategy and acknowledged directly that the members of the faith organization expected him to do so: “The holy People of God looks to us, and expects from us not simple and predictable condemnations, but concrete and effective measures to be undertaken” (Pentin, 2019, para 1). He did not directly reference those concrete corrective actions in the speech, but he did distribute a 21-point list of suggested rules that should be followed in the event of reported case of sexual abuse by a member of the clergy.
At the conclusion of the speech, Francis utilized the transcendence strategy, one defined by Benoit (1997) as an attempt to move the audience beyond the immediate crisis at hand and direct their attention to a time after the crisis when the organization has “learned from it,” “moved on,” or become “better” for having gone through the crisis. The Pope asked, “the Holy Spirit to sustain us throughout these days, and to help us turn this evil into an opportunity for awareness and purification” (Pentin, 2019, para 4). When coupled with deep mortification and corrective action strategies, the transcendence strategy is often an effective image repair strategy. Here, the Pope takes care not to be perceived as attempting to silence voices or quickly move past the abuse scandal and skip ahead to corrective measures. Pope Francis succeeded at balancing this scenario by attempting to usher the audience not to forget transgressions but to focus on how we can learn from them.
Pope Francis: Closing Speech at the Summit
Arguments made in the final speech examined here, the closing remarks by Pope Francis at the Summit, were foreshadowed in both the Letter to the People of God and in the opening statements at the event. Mortification and corrective action strategies were again foregrounded, and Pope Francis also outlined specific enforcement mechanisms to be followed at the first report of any new case of sexual abuse. Pope Francis argued that the scourge of pedophilia, though terrible in society at large, was even worse when it appeared in the Church—an institution once thought immune to failures of moral conscience. This public cognizance by the Pope also allowed him to further outline the Church’s corrective action approach, which included mortification (“no explanations will suffice”), and corrective actions which entailed punishment of offenders (“disciplinary measures”) up to and including law enforcement (“civil processes”) (Francis, 2019, para.8):
One specific recurrent demand from both survivors of abuse and external audiences skeptical of the Church’s response, was the insistence that the Pope endorse a “zero tolerance” policy with regard to new instances of abuse. One critic argued that “if the summit ends and the Pope doesn’t implement a zero-tolerance policy,” the ongoing investigations by law enforcement and the global media scrutiny will only “accelerate” (CBS, 2019, para 12). In a specific answer to victims’ advocates who were desperate for the Pope to outline a new approach, and in a clear example of a commitment to corrective action and a zero tolerance stance, Pope Francis (2019b) argued that “here again I would state clearly: if in the Church there should emerge even a single case of abuse – which already in itself represents an atrocity – that case will be faced with the utmost seriousness” (para 9). Pope Francis attempted to make it clear that Catholics must listen to the victims and take action to eradicate these abuses. In another example of both corrective action and mortification, Pope Francis argued that the Church would take every practical and judicial measure available, but also take the path of “self-accusation, prayer and penance” as a symbol of self-reflexivity and mortification (2019, para.14-15).
In another symbolic move, Pope Francis deployed a specific corrective action strategy designed to refute and preempt the standard allegation that the Church was only interested in protecting its own reputation at the expense of the victims. Here, Francis pledged to pursue “every measure” to “protect the little ones and prevent them from falling victim to any form of psychological and physical abuse” (2019, para.19). As further support of the Church’s new position, Pope Francis explicitly forbid cover-ups and pledged deeper commitment to bringing priestly perpetrators to justice, when he argued that “the Church will spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice whosoever has committed such crimes. The Church will never seek to hush up or not take seriously any case” (para 20). In line with this new commitment to serious abuse prevention and enforcement efforts, Pope Francis argued that, moving forward, the Church would follow codified rules, not just suggestions, which led to cover-ups of abuse in the past. Here, Pope Francis indicated that the effort would begin at the highest levels, with the Bishops, who would be required to follow systematized rules when dealing with reports of new or existing allegations (Francis, 2019, para.23).
Pope Francis listed several examples of specific corrective actions that would be undertaken by the Church. Not the least of which was a move to advocate for increased abuse awareness training of future priests while at seminary. This strategy could also be categorized as transcendence, because Francis argues that “an effort will be made to make past mistakes opportunities”; i.e., something good will come from the tragedy, and society will emerge better off because of it (Francis, 2019, para.21). This reference to improved training for future Catholic priests is both important, and potentially precarious given that the abuse crisis may have left present and future generations of the Catholic leadership simply absent (Britzky, 2018). Along these same strategic lines, Pope Francis argued specifically that measures should be taken to prevent future priests and members of the clergy from becoming addicted to pornography and to the overuse of modern digital media technologies. While this could also be classified as a blame-shifting strategy, as well, in that it deflected blame from individual members of the clergy and placed it on an external social factor, it is employed as corrective action in the context of the speech. Pope Francis was trying to ensure that the new generation of priests was better equipped to handle the pressures and temptations of contemporary life. In another example of the corrective action strategy, Pope Francis also made a nearly unprecedented move when he advocated listening to the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy. Here, he argued that the Church has a pastoral duty to provide victims with support, even if that entailed simple listening, even to the point of “wasting time” in listening (by this he means deep listening, to whatever the victims wish to speak about, and for whatever duration) (Francis, 2019, para.24). Given that the Church had been historically unresponsive to concerns of survivors and advocates, this move was especially impactful in theoretically gaining acceptance and at least tacit agreement within the audience to “understand and cooperate with them in return” (Maier, 2005, p.223).
Finally, in an exemplary deployment of the transcendence strategy, Pope Francis attempted to rehabilitate the image of the Catholic organization by envisioning a future free of the scourge of child sexual abuse both in the Church and in society at large. Francis (2019) wrote, “It will be precisely this holy people of God to liberate us from the plague of clericalism, which is the fertile ground for all these disgraces” (para.29). Francis concludes this passage by calling for, in the strongest possible terms (“an all-out battle”), a zero-tolerance policy (“must be erased from the face of the earth”) with regard to the issue of child sex abuse in the Church (para.31).
Conclusion
This article identified and set forth the various image restoration strategies used by Pope Francis in his discourse surrounding the 2019 Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church. We have argued here that Pope Francis relied primarily on a combination of mortification, corrective action, and transcendence strategies, all designed to communicate a change in the Church’s approach to the crisis. Many popular press and mass media outlets, including sources who had previously been vehemently opposed to any moves made by the church at image rehabilitation, corroborate this analysis. For example, one author noted that the Church’s first “official codification of the Church’s global policy”, led by and described by Pope Francis in his addresses at the Summit, were “thorough about how abuse allegations should be handled and powerful given the backing of the head of the Catholic Church” (Mandel, 2019, para 1 and 2). Coupled with Pope Francis’ “revolutionary” move in late December of 2019 to issue new canonical rules which eliminated the practice of protecting accused priests through “pontifical secrecy,” the new changes in language and practice had begun to signal “more openness, transparency, and willingness to collaborate with the civil authorities” (Povoledo, 2019, para 13). Whether ultimately judged to be successful or not, “Pope Francis set out to make tackling the abuse crisis one of his foremost priorities upon election in 2013, significantly breaking with his two immediate predecessors” (Mannion, 2018, para. 3).
Future Image Repair Best Practices
This article does not make a claim as to the “effectiveness” of Pope Francis’ image repair discourse. Rather, based on the analysis contained herein, we hope to suggest literature-based future best practices that would bolster the image restoration discourses of the Church. We suggest several options that are supported by the literature. First, typically the use of corrective action strategies by organizations in crisis is limited to the mere promise to take needed preventative and compensatory measures to correct the problem. In this case, that is exactly what the Church has done; since the Church is notably ‘behind’ in addressing the issue, it will take time for the new corrective actions to have an effect. I argue that these strategies would be more successful if they were supported by evidence to demonstrate that the new measures had actually worked, because as of now, the proposed actions sound good, but are not supported by data which suggest they will be effective in combating child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. The Catholic Church should generate its own research to test the efficacy of its response, and be transparent with the results. Time will tell.
Second, the Church must place more emphasis on its public-facing communication generally, and more specific emphasis on its crisis communication contingency planning. One author was astounded at the “lack of importance the Church places on communication”, complaining that “the Church has still not discovered that there is no effective action on this without effective communication” (Trancu, 2019, para 19). Indeed, the Church, throughout the lifetime of the scandal, has shown little sense of public relations savvy, despite its obvious similarities to a large, multinational corporation, and its status a large, hierarchical non-profit organization. Making matters worse, “the communication of the Vatican is situated far behind the possibilities and demands of modern communication” (Stohmeier, 2009, p.46). In other words, pretending that social media does not exist is simply not an option for the Catholic leadership at this point.
Limitations and Recommendations for Future Research
One of the hardest parts of conducting this study was narrowing down its focus and deciding what approaches to exclude from the parameters of the project. Many of those “discarded” ideas might be interesting in terms of future research. For instance, because of the size and scope of this project, and because of the unique benefits of studying the particular timeframe that we have isolated here, a deeper investigation into the earliest incantations of the Church’s crisis response have been omitted. Indeed, Pope John Paul II was well aware of the nascent scandal, and began both the process of public response, and private cover-up, which was to embody the Church’s approach for decades. A version of this project would likely be organized chronologically and start in the early 1980s rather than in 2019, as is the case here. Additionally, there is obviously a quantitative counterpart to this study in which one could use questionnaires and surveys to gauge the relative in/effectiveness of the crisis communication strategies employed by the leadership of the Catholic Church. Likewise, quantitative studies could be conducted with non-Catholics or other concerned public audiences in order to establish a comparison group(s), and to gauge the effect of image repair strategies among out-groups. It would be helpful to have hard evidence that backed our conclusions, rather than ultimately making an assertion (albeit a well-educated and painstakingly researched one) about how audiences would likely respond in a given situation, given similar situational and rhetorical constraints. Another avenue of potential research could be related to the ongoing nature of the scandal, and the evolving nature of Pope Francis’ response. It would be interesting to track the trajectory of Catholic image repair discourse as the scandal continues to unfold, new cases and allegations continue to surface, and new public and internal pressures continue to mount. Will Pope Francis continue to employ the correct image repair approaches? Will the Catholic religion recover from this crisis and continue to exist as one of the world’s dominant religions? This article hopefully helps to foment and inform projects which ask these types of questions.
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