Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church Key Lessons and New Perspectives in Crisis Communications

For over three decades, the sexual abuse crisis has been making waves in the Catholic Church. What started as turbulent waters ended as a real tsunami, with television cameras pointed at bishops from Boston to Dublin, from Lima to Paris, and from Toronto to Warsaw. The 2002 media investigations of the Boston Globe ",",Spotlight",", team in the United States spurred changes in the Church throughout the world. For over 30 years, the Church has worked to make itself a safer place for minors, at different speeds and with mixed results. The reform is still unfinished, and one of the biggest challenges is that of communication. This book seeks to address that part of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, analyzing what happened across the globe and applying the tools of crisis communications in order to suggest a path forward. Communications, integrated properly into the governance of the Church, can help victims to heal and the faithful to trust again. This book presents key lessons and new perspectives on the sexual abuse of minors within the Catholic Church.

Paulina Guzik has made an essential and comprehensive contribution to our understanding of the scourge of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. By looking at this critical issue through the frame of crisis communications, Guzik makes a significant and much-needed contribution to the discipline of communications as well. The principles and best practices elaborated here are crucial components of effective communication, which is itself crucial to effective institutional responses to this crisis. This book should be required reading not only for bishops, priests, and Catholic communications professionals, but for all committed to justice and healing for survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

Kim Daniels, J.D.

Director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown Universit