MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
By Ruben Rosario
POSTED: 10/26/2013
“Hide the truth and you hide Christ” — A popular Greek saying.
It was 2002. A publicly embarrassing clergy child sex-abuse scandal was unfolding in a large city on the East Coast. Take a wild guess which one.
It wasn’t long before Jonathan Bernstein’s phone rang. Bernstein is a successful Los Angeles County-based crisis-management expert. The folks at the other end of the conference call included the archbishop, his spokesperson and a church lawyer.
They expressed interest in hiring his firm but first wanted his general advice on how best to snuff out the inferno of bad publicity.
Bernstein obliged.
“I told them that they needed to do three basic things — total candor, total transparency and total humility,” Bernstein told me last week. “They said, ‘Thank you very much,’ hung up, and I never heard from them again.”
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