Conjecture 4: …and a good reputation too

Propaganda stems from the College of Cardinals Congregatio de propaganda fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) installed in1622 by Pope Gregory XV. This is an activity of an organization to win souls for certain beliefs or principles. Propaganda contains an ideological element, else we speak of advertising. Primarily to spread the faith, secondly to vest the trust in the Church as the institution of that faith. This last function has to be regarded as a way to invest in social license and image, with the symbols, rituals and logo that come along (the cross can indeed be regarded as a universal logo of the Catholic Church). A notion of ‘social license to operate‘ must have existed during the centuries. License in the sense of legitimizing policies. The crusades that were conducted in order to recover Jerusalem from the Islamic inhabitants of the 11^th to the 13^th century most certainly had to be legitimized by a papal bull, had to serve a justifiable goal and should be conducted with the right intention. The clergy announced the bull subsequently from the pulpit, serving as a call for the crusaders for fighting for the good cause on the one hand and justifying the bloodshed, but probably also the sacrifices, taxes, looting and plundering for the non combatants on the other hand, bearing in mind it took the first crusaders three years (1096-1099) to get to the Holy Land. Without a salary. Pope Urbanus II who called for the first crusade would nowadays probably be passionately twittering or producing selfies, but in the absence of those, he travelled all over France in 1095 to recruit knights and peasants from every Godforsaken place.

Attaining social license is thus an inseparable part of the company policy, which in turn has to sustain the image of the organization. The last decades saw a series of attacks on the reputation of the Church, notably cases of child abuse. Many of the cases span several decades and are brought forward years after the abuse occurred.* “The sexual abuse of children under the age of consent by priests has received significant media and public attention in Canada, Ireland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Belgium, France, Germany and Australia, while cases have been reported throughout the world.”** Social license is, once again, a high priority of the Pope. Acquiring the acceptance of society can be seen as indispensable part of policy and intertwines with (a good) image. A good image is like a raincoat: it is resistible to some drops. Many States conducted thorough, sometimes even criminal research in the sexual abuse case and the Church didn’t remain untouched, at the same time the episode was not ultimately disastrous for the institution.  Like the miserable reputation of Richard III for centuries remained immune for rehabilitation, conversely the Church as an institution of the faith appears to be rather resistant to ugly acts (of some) and continuous streams of negative publicity.

Next time: The Bard, internal and external perspective

*Paul Michael Garrett, “A Catastrophic, Inept, Self-Serving Church Re examining Three Reports on Child Abuse in the Republic of Ireland” Art. 24.1, 2013:43–65.

** Michael Paulson, ‘World doesn’t share US view of scandal: Clergy sexual abuse reaches far, receives an uneven focus’, The Boston Glob, 8 April 2002.

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