The Roman Catholic Church: A Centuries Old History of Awareness of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse (from the First to the 19th Century)

Debates in international forums and in mainstream media on the role, responsibility, liability, and response of ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) toward clerical child sexual abuse (cCSA) fail to take into account the historical roots and awareness of the problem. Reports also fail to mention the historic organizational laws RCC developed over centuries. In contrast, RCC documents evidence that the Catholic Church not only carried century’s old history of cCSA, but also repeatedly condemned cCSA by successive papal authorities, organizational laws, and institutional management mechanisms. During the first millennium, however, church laws remained confined to the bookshelves and were not converted into appropriate management policies and infrastructural models. This was largely due to the absence of a central administrative organizational structure, which developed later in the 12th century, following the Second Council of Lateran (1139) when the Papacy asserted its authority to establish administrative control over the organizational church. It was only then that management policies started to be framed and institutional structures enacted to deal more appropriately with cCSA from the 14th to 20th centuries. Despite this, RCC developed a culture of secrecy using clandestine organizational management models and institutional laws prescribed in 1568, 1622, 1741, 1866, 1922, and 1962 which aimed to manage cCSA. The current study traces reported cCSA as far back as the first century and critically examines the organizational laws, and institutional policies developed by RCC to address clerical sexual misconduct up to the end of the 19th century.     

Catholic Sociology in Ireland in Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the relationship between the Catholic Church and Irish sociology within a comparative framework. Drawing on archival and documentary research, this linkage is investigated at an institutional and intellectual level, across three stages of the “career” of Irish Catholic sociology, and employing comparisons with Catholic sociology in France, Germany, and the United States. I discern important sources of variation between the four cases including major intellectuals, organisational hosts, and publishing outlets. Irish Catholic sociology’s quite sudden movement in the direction of secular sociology in the 1950s is explained as a result of normative pressure to jettison its value-driven orientation as a result of more frequent interaction with the mainstream discipline via scholarly collaboration, the reforms of Vatican II emphasising engagement with the modern world, the demise of the broader Catholic Action movement of which it was a part, and changes in the national higher education environment.     

The Effective Use of New Media in Disseminating Evangelical Messages Among Catholic College Students

Religious life of American youth has received little attention from social scientists, but this is changing as research underscores the importance of religious identity. The Catholic Church has historically employed new forms of communication to reach its followers. This article examines Catholic college students’ use of new media and the impact on their faith. To explore this, a qualitative method was used. Five major themes emerging from the study were: (a) positive effects of Christian media content, (b) everyday use of new media, (c) the Catholic Church is buried in tradition, (d) importance of credible sources, and (e) failure to program toward youth. Data collected from these qualitative interviews suggest the Catholic Church must become aggressive in utilizing new media and programming messages of faith and education about the Church to this younger generation as their values are being shaped.     

Building a religious brand: Exploring the foundations of the Church of Scientology through public relations

ABSTRACT

Although L. Ron Hubbard is known for founding the Church of Scientology, he is not generally considered a public relations practitioner. However, his efforts to practice the discipline to advance Scientology are documented in Church publications. Unlike examinations of older religions, which require reinterpretations of activities through a public relations lens, existing Church documents allow for an evaluation of the role public relations played in building a religious movement. This article explores how Hubbard used public relations to establish Scientology, finding he embraced practices such as celebrity endorsement and image management but eschewed common media relations and crisis communication practices.     

Critique of the Vatican’s Role in Recent Child Protection Practice: A Brief Report

The current report aims to clarify the practices and implicit intentions of the Holy See in addressing child sexual abuse (CSA) by clerics in the twenty-first century. Church investigation reports, United Nations reports, press coverage, and academic literature were explored to understand the relationship between Church intention and practice. Various types of literature highlight the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) as an organization that is self-referential and self-defensive, with the implicit aim of protecting the reputation of RCC at the expense of children. Organizational responses are seen as promoting the protection of perpetrating clerics, resulting in the spread of CSA by clergy nationally and globally. Recommendations are made for the introduction of modern-day management practices in RCC, filtered through a faithful understanding of gospel principles. The authors suggest that the United Nations may be an important vehicle for fostering leverage for change in RCC child protection practice.     

Framing Child Sexual Abuse: A Longitudinal Content Analysis of Newspaper and Television Coverage, 2002–2012

ABSTRACT

The way in which the news media frame child sexual abuse can influence public perception. This content analysis of the child sexual abuse coverage of eight national news organizations in the United States from 2002 to 2012 includes the two dominant events of the Catholic Church and Pennsylvania State University child sexual abuse scandals. Census and systematic stratified sampling techniques were applied to articles obtained from the Lexis/Nexis Academic database, resulting in a sample of 503 articles. Intercoder reliability was ensured by double coding a randomly selected sample. Study findings indicate a shift in the attribution of responsibility of child sexual abuse among news organizations over the past decade from an individual-level problem with individual-level solutions to a societal-level problem with institutional culpability. Nevertheless, individual-level solutions continue to be framed as the best possible solution.     

Motivations for Reading the Left Behind Book Series: A Uses and Gratifications Analysis

This uses and gratifications study investigates motivations for reading the Left Behind book series and their correlation to media use patterns; religious commitments; and the Conservative Protestant, Mainline, or Catholic Christian background of readers. The survey of 1,188 readers found that sanctified entertainment and “end times” teaching were the top reasons for reading the series. There was a significant positive relationship between religious media use and spiritual growth/development, content reaction, and accuracy. A significant positive relationship was found between religious commitment and content reaction, and religious commitment and biblical accuracy reading motivations. The study revealed different reading motivations among the various denominations, especially Catholics.     

Collaborative Responses to the Demands of Emerging Human Needs

Abstract

The paper explores the disintegration and integration which exist between faith and religion and social work and learning. There is a brief explanation of Catholic Papal Teachings and Catholic Social Teaching as a demonstration of de facto concordance between social work and religion. The paper contains citations based on the current social principles of the Catholic Church, several recent papal exhortations and encyclicals. These readings highlight the need for good social work practice. The paper ends with some practical suggestions in ways to promote collaboration between the two fields of endeavor.     

Resisting Institutionalization: Religious Professionals in the Emerging Church*

This article discusses how organizations can resist normative institutional pressures associated with the use of formally trained and credentialed professionals. This research draws on neoinstitutional theories of isomorphism and utilizes a framework of religious training developed by Finke and Dougherty (2002) , which emphasizes both the social and religious capital gained during professionalization, to show that resistance to normative institutional pressures is possible. The data demonstrate that organizations which act to reformulate the role of religious professionals in a way which limits both the opportunities and ability of clergy to implement and maintain organizational routines and processes can successfully avoid normative institutional forces. This research draws on over 50 interviews and 100 hours of fieldwork with people in the Emerging Church, a religious movement that has arisen in the last 25 years as a response to increasing distrust of institutional authority. This study helps to close the gap between institutional studies of organizations and the sociology of religion by suggesting that some, currently overlooked, organizational activities can be more accurately understood as deliberate attempts to resist institutionalizing forces.     

Preparing to face the media in times of crisis: Training spokespersons’ verbal and nonverbal cues

Seventeen in-depth interviews with professional media trainers from Belgium were carried out to examine which recommendations are offered during media training of organizational spokespersons. The interviews reveal the recommendations of media trainers concerning verbal, visual, and vocal cues of spokespersons, with special focus on addressing the media in times of organizational crisis. The findings offer a structured overview of practical recommendations given by media trainers to organizational spokespersons. In addition, the findings put the scarce academic literature about the optimal verbal and nonverbal delivery of crisis responses into perspective, by showing if and how those theoretical aspects are addressed in practice. Based on these insights a research agenda for crisis communication delivery is set.     

A Catholic Perspective on Gay Priestly Ministry from the Closet

Abstract

Overview of Catholic doctrine and interpretation of Catholic teachings pertaining to homosexuals and homosexual practice are reviewed by two “closeted” homosexual priests. The paper considers the role of the clergy and expectations of the Church regarding pastoral ministry to homosexuals. Case studies highlighting unique contributions by ‘closetedr’ and ‘open’ homosexual clergy to pastoral care of homosexual parishioners are presented. The authors discuss personal and professional dilemmas facing homosexual clergy including ‘coming out’, homosexual bonding within religious communities, and the wide range of attitudes among Catholics, lay and religious, concerning homosexual Catholics.     

Abused Women in Taiwan Who Seek Religious Support

ABSTRACT

This research explores the types of religious healing that abused women use and surveys their experiences with these practices in Taiwan. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of abused women, who had been recruited from 12 agencies. The findings show that participants sought religious healing for a variety of reasons, and that they had both positive experiences (e.g., useful religious support) and negative experiences (e.g., encountering deceptive jitongs and spending a large amount of money on services) regardingr the support provided by different religions. This study also found that women who believed in traditional Eastern religions had more negative experiences than women who believed in Western religions.     

Social media,temporality, and the legitimacy of protest

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular ‘speeds’ -the rate at which media content is renewed – as well as ‘temporal orientations’ towards present, past, and future. The article questions how specific temporal regimes enable or complicate protestors’ efforts to gain public legitimacy. A large body of research suggests that it is difficult to gain such legitimacy in the mainstream news cycle, in which protest is primarily covered from an ‘episodic’ perspective, ignoring larger protest issues. The present analysis suggests that despite the participatory affordances of social media, it has not become any easier to generate sustained public attention for structural protest issues. Drawing examples from three case studies, it demonstrates that the dominant mode of social media protest communication reproduces and reinforces the episodic focus of the mainstream news. While other temporal perspectives on protest are certainly developed in the alternative and mainstream news, as well as in activist social media communication, these do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing temporal orientation towards the present, towards the event.     

Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now: characterizing the swindler as an important cultural and organizational figure

ABSTRACT

The current paper revisits Anthony Trollope's Victorian novel, The Way We Live Now, focusing on the main character of Augustus Melmotte. The paper analyzes the novel and its literary figure of a corrupt financier or swindler, drawing out theoretical and pedagogical contributions for organizational and management research. Contributions are framed in terms of imaginative organizational role archetypes embodied in swindler characterizations, swindlers’ institutional work across societal elites, and the dark sides and grey areas associated with swindlers’ organizational and financial misconduct. The rise and fall of Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's Victorian English society thus finds its cultural parallels today in outsiders who challenge financial and political elites and the status quo, at high personal risk to themselves and others complicit in their schemes. The conclusions concern the importance of recognizing dynamic figures that seize immense power over organizational, financial and political cultures.     

Gender Equality as Institutional Work: The Case of the Church of Sweden

Institutional theory predicts that organizations respond to external changes in their environment to be able to safeguard their long‐term viability. One of the most significant institutional changes in the last century has been the entry of women into both labour markets and professions; however, an extensive literature reports that gender inequality and various forms of sexism still structure and influence the everyday work of organizations. Drawing on the recent literature on institutional work, the article reports on a study of how the Church of Sweden has managed to relatively successfully institutionalize female ministers as legitimate and widely respected members of the professional category of ministers ordained by the Church. Female ministers believe they are, by and large, respected in the Church, but suggest that gender remains an issue as women are at times expected to embody certain interests and have to answer some questions that their male colleagues may have been spared. The findings describe institutional work as an ongoing process with no fixed end‐point, stressing agency as the distributed and collective capacity to question established beliefs and norms.     

Romaphobia and the media: mechanisms of power and the politics of representations

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Identities, entitled ‘Romaphobia and the media’, examines entrenched and ongoing media coverage of Roma, Gypsy and Traveller people across Europe. The focus is on how the media problematises the Roma, how it constructs a ‘conceptual map’ about Roma people and what this tells us about the societies we live in. This special issue includes five academic articles all examining the constructions and stereotypes used in the media in various formats and European countries. After these academic articles, this special issue then deviates from the normal journal structure by including three commentary pieces from professionals from varying Roma backgrounds to give their views and experiences on how they tackle Romaphobia and the media. The inclusion of these commentary pieces are very powerful in offering a perspective of active interventions and resistance that we should not forget amidst the depressing continued circulation of racialised stereotypes.     

Could it happen again? Catholic Church Image Repair Strategies in the Revocation of the Excommunication of the Four Lefebvrian Bishops

This paper applies the theory of image restoration discourse to the public outcry over the Pope's 2009 revocation of the excommunication of four schismatic Society of Saint Pius X Bishops. The author argues that the Church correctly implemented image restoration strategies, but that the very organizational and rhetorical characteristics of the Church complicate the articulation of an adequate, timely response easily digestible by the media and public opinion.     

The effects of media slant on public perception of an organization in crisis

This study investigates the effects of mainstream media coverage on public perception of an organizational program in crisis. A survey was administered via Qualtrics using a web-based network sampling approach. The survey contained two mainstream media clips, one slanted negatively and the other slanted positively regarding an incident within the organizational program. Participants viewed both clips and answered questions regarding their perceptions of the program immediately after viewing each clip. Order of clip presentation was counterbalanced. Results of a mixed-model ANOVA revealed main effects for both media slant and presentation order on perceptions of the program; no statistically significant interaction was found between presentation order and media slant. Recommendations for practice, limitations and directions for future research are provided.