Three - The Catholic Church, scandal and media
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2022
Summary
When all the numbing details of the [Dublin] report are absorbed, we have to reassemble the big picture of the institutional church's relationship with Irish society. And we have to say that relationship itself has been an abusive one. The church leadership behave towards society with the same callousness, the same deviousness, the same exploitative mentality and the same blindly egotistical pursuit of its own desires that an abuser shows towards his victim. (Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times 28 November 2009)
Over the last 25 years, revelations of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy have given rise to one of the greatest institutional scandals of modern history. Sexual abuse by Catholic clergy has been reported across all five continents, though the countries that have received most attention are located in the ‘First World’, including the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and more recently, Germany, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Malta, Italy and Switzerland (Keenan, 2012: 3). The media played a key role in raising awareness of clerical child abuse in these countries by bringing this hitherto taboo subject to a mass audience and by campaigning for public inquiries into the church's handling of allegations. Moreover, in decrying the ‘evils’ of child abuse, the media acted as society's moral arbitrator, a role previously occupied by the church itself.
In this chapter we explore the role of the media in exposing clerical child abuse in Ireland, focusing in particular on how a series of television documentaries paved the way for two major inquiries (Ferns and Dublin) and on the media's subsequent coverage of the inquiry reports. We look at how the controversy surrounding the clerical child abuse inquiries embodied key features of an ‘institutional scandal’: social norms were transgressed leading to moral outrage; the actions of individuals brought the Catholic Church as a whole into disrepute; and allegations of institutional ‘cover-ups’ proved to be as damaging as the acts they sought to conceal. The process of ‘scandal inflation’, whereby the media keeps a story alive by finding new ‘angles’ and ‘unveiling even more bizarre or aberrant behaviours’ (Butler and Drakeford, 2003) is also considered in relation to media coverage of the inquiries.
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- Dark Secrets of ChildhoodMedia Power, Child Abuse and Public Scandals, pp. 85 - 126Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2015