Dealing with Employment Crisis: Is Vatican Hierarchy Insane?

In my last post on employment lessons to be learned from the child sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, I suggested that employers should keep an eye on how the Vatican deals with the latest revelations of abuse to learn how an employer in crisis should or should not handle such a matter. Even though new allegations of abuse surface almost every day, the Vatican and its hierarchy have entered a bunker and are returning fire.

The Church hierarchy’s defiant tone is undoubtedly fueled by suggestions that Pope Benedict XVI has culpability in the Church’s long cover-up of the scandal. Although the Pope has spoken strongly and movingly about the shame of the scandal, he’s failed to address the allegations about him. His defenders are outraged that the Holy Father has become a target. Thus, instead of addressing the world-wide nature of the scandal and disciplining those who caused it, the powers that be are merely remonstrating.

Drawing employment lessons from this scandal provokes criticism, but they are staring us in the face. Connecting employment law with this fiasco is ridiculed, but employment law issues abound: negligent hiring, negligent supervision, negligent retention, assault, outrageous conduct, infliction of emotional distress. Anyone critical of the Vatican’s handling of this crisis is labeled a Catholic-hater, but the scandal itself is undermining everything the Church stands for.

There’s still time to teach employers how to deal with a severe employment crisis, but it’s slipping away. The Church and its hierarchy should come out of the bunker and hear the words of the one they claim to represent on earth: “Woe to you, blind guides . . . . You have neglected the more important matters of  . . . justice, mercy and faithfulness . . . . You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel . . . . You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence . . . . You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.”

1. 

   E. says:

   April 9, 2010 at 9:34 pm

   Well said.

   As one who used to be on the inside of the RCC, I can see how the Church hates being “outed” in any way that will bring scandal or discredit to it. What it is trying to defend is that the great majority of priests are NOT pedophiles or sexual predators of any kind. It hurts when the media paints with such a biased and broad brush. So they lash out, and hunker down, and defend, defend, defend because they feel they must. They are standing up for their own, the good ones.

   But the hierarchy in the Church has been in terrible denial about this issue for an inexcusably long time. It failed to recognize how the world has gotten smaller, more media savvy, and it could no longer keep a lid on this sad sordid and destructive history.

   At least five years before the Boston scandal erupted a New Orleans journalist named Jason Berry wrote a book about sexual abuse and pedophilia in the Church. He was also a Catholic. He was widely discredited as some sort of “liberal” for his book. I read the book a few years after its publication and it was incredible to me. Well documented, excellently written, yet uncompromising in its call for the Church to recognize that it had a major brewing crisis on its hands and it better begin to deal with it. He was denounced and ignored, and yet he was spot on right.

   What is happening currently is just more of the same. A Church being caught and failing to accept the truth of what, in my opinion, it has surely contributed to, with it’s fundamentally anti-sex, all male clergy and its requirement of celibacy for it’s Western priests. I’m no longer in the fray, surely hell-bound, in many RC’s opinion, but it is still very very sad to witness from the cheap seats. E.
2. 

   John Phillips says:

   April 10, 2010 at 9:08 am

   E,

   Thank you for this comment. All your points are good ones, and I particularly appreciate the point about the vast majority of RC priests not being bad guys in this sad story. That’s something that shouldn’t be forgotten, though it often is.

   Of course, that’s true it seems when any scandal breaks. It involves a minority, not the majority. Yet the more reporting there is, the more those at the top hunker down. That’s human nature I suppose. It also usually means that some of those at the top are involved in the scandal (in the RCC’s case, the cover-up).

   I really appreciate your bringing your perspective to this matter.

   John