In the winter of 2002, The Boston Globe published an exposé on clergy sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese which quickly sparked a global Church crisis. Following the exposé, there was a swell of media attention, a growing public outcry, increasing litigation over alleged abuse and cover-ups, and the emergence of issue-driven grassroots organizations. Despite the vocal involvement of numerous stakeholders in the crisis, the hierarchy’s communicative response to the situation followed relatively traditional crisis management strategies which sought to deny, minimize, remediate, and retain exclusive jurisdiction over the crisis. This strategy contrasts with other stakeholders’ attempts to defer closure, draw out underlying issues, amplify nondominant voices, contest dominant interpretations, and collaborate on possible solutions. What has emerged is an on-going situation in which an organization’s attempts at strategic communicative crisis management are being contested publicly by key stakeholders. Arguing that existing models for understanding public relations discourse are insufficient for tracing the polyvocality of crisis communication, this study crafts an alternative (i.e., dialogic) model for analyzing crisis communication. This model decenters the source organization by tracing the contextual (macro) and interactive (micro) aspects of public relations texts created by three organizations central to the crisis (the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, Voice of the Faithful, and Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests). By viewing crisis communication through the lens of a particular notion of dialogue (i.e., a sustained, symbol-based, contextualized, collaborative-agonistic process of interactive social inquiry which creates meaning and a potential for change), this study traces how organizations use Public Relations (PR) to co-construct an organizational crisis. Discursive reconciliation, the central process of the proposed model, allows the researcher to sift the discourses of stakeholder organizations against one another, using each as a standard for evaluating the others. This allows for an evaluation of how stakeholder organizations manage the potential for communicative interactivity. The proposed model offers an expanded capacity to understand how crises are constructed discursively. It also illuminates the continuing clergy sex abuse crisis.

Sexual abuse perpetrated by trusted members of the clergy presents unique challenges to clinicians and yet the current literature on the effects of clergy sexual abuse is sparse. The vast majority of current research on clergy sexual abuse is based on the perspective of the perpetrators and not the survivors. Some literature suggests that clergy sexual abuse is equivalent to incest due to the level of betrayal trauma associated with each form of abuse. The current study seeks to examine the effects of clergy perpetrated sexual abuse on survivors and examine those effects in the context of the general literature on childhood sexual abuse. Adult male and female survivors of clergy sexual abuse were recruited online and asked to complete a series of self-report measures of religiosity, spirituality, and traumatic symptomology, including the Spiritual Beliefs Inventory (SBI-15R), Spiritual Wellbeing Scale (SWBS), and the Trauma Symptoms Inventory-2 (TSI-2). Participants also provided demographic information and completed a structured self-report questionnaire of history of sexual abuse. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that there were no between-group differences on measures of trauma or existential belief, but found that those abused by clergy reported lower levels of religious beliefs and practice, less social support from their religious community, less satisfaction with their relationship with God, and were more likely to have changed their religious affiliation. These data suggest that abuse perpetrated by clergy has a unique and measurable impact on survivors’ future religiosity and spirituality as compared to other forms of childhood sexual abuse.