Step one: stop lying.
The Catholic Church just can’t seem to figure out how to deal with the seemingly endless stream of sexual abuse cases involving clergymen. Of course, as Bernstein Crisis Management President Jonathan Bernstein revealed in an interview with columnist Ruben Rosario of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, it’s not for a lack of advice from crisis management pros:
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.”
While Rosario’s interview was prompted by the current situation with the Twin Cities archdiocese, in which church officials neglected to warn parishoners of a child-molesting priest’s sexual addiction, the advice Jonathan dished out applies just as well to the church as a whole. According to him, the cause of many errors in the church’s crisis management are similar to those he sees often in large corporations, namely arrogance and self-denial:
“Those are critical barriers that also play out in large corporations,” Bernstein said. “In this instance, the attitude is that only the church can decide what is wrong, and if the church can hide it, they will hide it. Withholding information from the police, much less the public, is not good and it’s clear, based on what I’ve read, that they did that.”
There are plenty of examples for the church to see the damage their current attitude will continue, including the infamous accounting firm Arthur Andersen, whose destruction came about not as a result of legal proceedings, but due to a failure to take heed when distrust began to flood the court of public opinion.
He (Bernstein) cites the demise of Arthur Andersen, once one of the nation’s major accounting firms, as an example of what not to do.
Arthur Andersen folded after it was linked to a massive $100 billion fraud tied to the Enron Corp. Bernstein served as a consultant early on and gave them the same advice he gave church officials 11 years ago.
“They had the same mentality,” he said. “We can’t do anything wrong, and if we do, we’ll just cover it up.”
He believes the status quo will drive away parishioners and erode trust in the church hierarchy.
“They have to change their behavior,” he said. “Unless the pope, and forgive my language, essentially says de facto, ‘Cut this (expletive) out,’ they are not going to do it and will continue making the same mistakes.”
And that, really, is the key here isn’t it? While communications play a major role, the most essential aspect of crisis management is putting a stop to what’s creating the problems in the first place. It is often difficult for those in positions of power to admit they’ve made poor decisions, especially when, as in this case, those decisions contributed to the pain and suffering of many families. But when continuing on your current path only leads to more hurt, it’s time to change course.
The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com