The Church's PR Nightmare

By Paul Vitello
Long Island (NY) Newsday
April 28, 2002

The Catholic dioceses have begun hiring public relations firms. In Philadelphia and Boston, they've had them on call for a while. The Diocese of Rockville Centre just hired the firm of Rubenstein Associates, a company famous for crisis management. Kathie Lee Gifford and Lizzie Grubman are two recent crises of theirs. Soon maybe the pope will be another.

To hire a PR firm usually requires of a client three basic conditions: to be caught dead to rights in scandal, to have lots of money and to be determined against all odds to live in denial. The church qualifies. "If the inference here is that we are going to be 'spinning' for them, that's just not so," said Gary Lewi, the PR executive in charge of the Rockville Centre diocese account for Rubenstein. He spoke by phone on Friday. "There is a far more sophisticated audience on Long Island than that. No one would stand for that for a nanosecond."

It's true, no one would stand for that. On the other hand, there has not been much gray area to work with in this story - that misty region where PR people work their makeover miracles.

Everything that happens, everything that has been said so far about the sorry history of priests who use children for sex, just makes the church look worse:

It denies the gravity of the problem for decades, treating its pederast priests as sufferers of some rare moral infection rather than as predators who brutalize children. It plays hot potato with the molesters, shifting them around. Then, when the stuff hits the fan, it blames the psychiatric professionals who gave it advice. Then it blames the general rot of American culture; it blames the media. Then it blames the homosexuals.

Then the pope announces that child molesting is in fact a crime; and the American cardinals hold days-long meetings, after which they announced there may be "zero tolerance" for this crime in the future except in cases where the priest has really really turned a new leaf, and is not "notorious."

Balking at the (measly) promise to rid the church of men who come on to children, the cardinals adopt a plan to remove only those priests involved in "the serial, predatory sexual abuse of minors" - the ones who had become "notorious." If a priest is not notorious, he should get at least a second chance with the kids, they seem to say. But isn't that the precise epicenter of this whole disaster - priests who violate scores of children for generations and never become notorious? They remained safely under the radar, thanks to what Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston delicately refers to as "our inadequate record keeping."

Last month, Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre goes for weeks claiming that there are no credible charges against any priests currently working in the diocese - until people come forward to remind him of their charges against a priest, still working in the diocese. It is a case credible enough, apparently, to merit the priest's dismissal on the same day that a newspaper reporter calls the diocese to ask about him.

So, what does it take for a man to get notorious around here?

And where does a PR man suit up before entering a public relations Chernobyl such as this?

The PR man would not say. "You're looking at an institution in an enormous amount of pain," said Lewi of his Rockville Centre client, though he could easily have said this of the church as a whole. "They are struggling to produce institutional changes, and our job is to help them project those changes."

So far, the changes in Rockville Centre are to be projected as follows: A handful of priests have been removed from their parishes; dozens of past accusations against other priests have been turned over to the authorities; Bishop Murphy has set up two committees to review future allegations - one to be headed by a former Nassau police commissioner empowered (by Murphy) to refer any credible cases directly to law enforcement.

The changes are not nothing. But they do not treat priests as equals to criminal suspects who are not priests, for instance.

They maintain a protective screen between the accused priest and the state - a screen that no other category of worker enjoys except maybe the cops. And cops do not have the priests' access to children.

Since Murphy did not say otherwise, it also is assumed that his changing institution will abide by the principles of sex abuse investigation reached by the American cardinals last week in Rome. The key principle they embraced was that certain predators are probably not that bad.

Pity the PR man who takes this sorry account.