CATHOLIC Church Pushes Pr Overhaul in Wake of Priest Abuse Scandals

By Kevin O'Connor
VTDigger
December 24, 2018

https://vtdigger.org/2018/12/24/catholic-church-pushes-pr-overhaul-wake-priest-abuse-scandals/

Vermont Catholic Bishop Christopher Coyne

Vermont Catholic leaders had talked for hours about the rise in priest misconduct headlines and fall in parishioner attendance when a woman, listening to the recent strategy session to forge a better future, asked a question: Why weren’t they spending more time proclaiming the good news?

The 72 parishes of the statewide Roman Catholic Diocese support more than 170 nonprofit organizations that serve the hungry, poor, sick, homeless or imprisoned, a new survey reveals, with many churches also offering their own emergency aid, soup kitchens, food shelves and thrift shops.

Members of the state’s largest religious denomination, understanding yet weary of seemingly nonstop coverage of child-abuse claims against past personnel, fear the public is forgetting the church has a good side.

“The stories we’ve given the media have been bad ones,” Vermont Catholic Bishop Christopher Coyne says.

Just this past week, the church settled yet another lawsuit involving a former priest, bringing the total number of publicized cases to more than 40 over the past two decades.

In response, Coyne, who just stepped down as communications chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is stepping up his statewide public relations efforts. Visit a parish anywhere from Burlington to Brattleboro, for example, and you’ll find copies of the new quarterly Vermont Catholic Magazine, with 80 glossy pages spotlighting parishioners’ charitable efforts.

Brattleboro’s St Michael’s Church is featured for raising $250,000 to renovate its St. Brigid’s Kitchen and Pantry, whose 50 volunteers serve 20,000 meals a year to anyone in need.

Carolyn Pieciak, cites the Gospel of Matthew, says when asked why she serves as the kitchen’s director: “For I was hungry and you gave me food.”

Rutland’s Vermont Catholic Charities is profiled for offering financial aid, mental-health counseling and information about its four state-licensed residential care facilities.

“People ask me why the church helps people,” emergency aid coordinator Katrina Corbett is quoted. “I reply, ‘Because we are Catholic.’ That is part of our mission.”

Burlington’s Cathedral of St. Joseph is recognized for collaborating with Spectrum Youth and Family Services to host a winter warming shelter.

“The need for this was identified due to our other housing programs being full and our waitlist becoming lengthy,” Spectrum executive director Mark Redmond is quoted. “The parish was extremely flexible in making the church available.”

The magazine, with a look similar to Vermont Life, recently won the Catholic Press Association’s national award for top such publication.

“It is important now more than ever to recognize this light and not let the recent darkness that has settled upon our church become a barrier to faith,” editor Ellen Kane writes in the current issue. “We must remember that it is the people in the pews that make up the church, and it is through us that hearts and minds can change.”

The diocese also is communicating through a website and such social media as its Facebook account, also deemed the best by the Catholic Press Association.

The Vermont Catholic Church’s present media push comes because of its leader’s past experience. Coyne drew rare praise as the Archdiocese of Boston’s spokesman after the Boston Globe revealed decades of clergy misconduct in a 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning series featured in the film “Spotlight.”

“Coyne’s has been a more forthcoming and compassionate voice, and, perhaps because he is a priest, his words seem to many to carry greater weight,” the Globe wrote at the time.

Coyne went on to serve as Pope Francis’ media aide during the pontiff’s 2015 visit to New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and currently has a social media presence that includes at least 15,000 followers on Facebook, Twitter (@bishopcoyne) and his own website, bishopcoyne.org.

Coyne has surprised many by releasing more public statements about past diocesan misconduct than his predecessors did collectively since the first charges were publicized a quarter-century ago.

“When I was in Boston, one of the largest mistakes we made was that we let the lawyers drive the bus,” he has said of the church’s earlier public relations strategy. “That was not the pastoral thing to do.”

To promote more transparency, Coyne has released past child abuse victims from nondisclosure agreements, formed a lay committee to review clergy misconduct files and promised to publicly release the names of offenders after the start of the new year.

The church also is allying more with secular human service providers. It has closed its Burlington food pantry, for example, to instead funnel its contributions to the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf.

“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” the bishop says. “There are an awful lot of good people and organizations that already are doing a lot of good work.”

Coyne says one unmet challenge is a response to opioid addiction.

“We’re not doing enough, but it’s not because we don’t want to — where we’re really lacking is how can we help?”

In the meantime, the church wants to better communicate what it can do.

“It can be a bit frustrating when people attack the church for the scandalous stories and lose sight of everything else,” Coyne says. “I’ve been encouraging our people to wear T-shirts that identify themselves as Catholic, to say ‘this is who were are and this is what we do.’ There are so many good things that are being done in the state that say more about our faith.”