Public Relations and the Sex Abuse Crisis

In listening to the Bishops and the Vatican circling the wagons in support of the Pope, I first thought that Spiro T. Agnew had returned from the dead to advise the Church on how to respond to a crisis: blame the media. Tell your parishioners to cancel their subscriptions to the New York Times.

 

But then came the utterly bizarre remarks of the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa. Not even Spiro, perhaps not even Fox News, could walk quite as far into outer darkness.   

 

David Wolpe the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles responds to this in the Washington Post here, “When confronted with remarks such as that of Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, the Pope's personal preacher, that accusations against the Pope and the Catholic church are reminiscent of the "collective violence" suffered by the Jews" one must gasp, and then respond.

“Two impulses fight for ascendancy in response. First: do not give way to fury, since this is one thoughtless, brutal remark by one man. Why should such stunning insensitivity, such historical ignorance, such defensive asininity, be excoriated rather than dismissed?

But then there is that second impulse. I know too many survivors. I have heard their stories . . . It seems that each time a group is aggrieved they compare their pain to the holocaust. It rubs raw the never healed wound.

“Moreover, I think of the real victims of the church scandal; the children whose lives were permanently blighted by the cruelty and appetites of wicked men. To use the sufferings of the Jews as an analogy for the church's public discomfort -- given our painful shared history -- is indescribably tactless. . . . .

 

“Even to the powerful, the posture of a victim is often easy and attractive. The church is not the victim. Some reactions may be wide of the mark. Some people may be unjustly swept in the net sewn by the actions of others. But I would remind Rev. Cantalamessa of the precise nature of the holocaust: Six million people, including one-and-a-half million children, were starved, gassed, shot, burned, humiliated, brutalized, murdered, not for what they did but for who they were.

 

“You have added, with this callousness, yet another reason for repentance. Has the toll not already grown heavy enough?”

cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com (comments section open there)