Davis, S. (2021). Reporting the “Summer of Shame”: Clergy Sex Abuse and U.S. Catholic Journalism in 2018. Unc Charlotte Electronic Theses And Dissertations.
This paper explores how two US Catholic newspapers—the National Catholic Reporter and the National Catholic Register—reported on the topic of sex abuse in the Church in 2018, revolving around how they presented and discussed the events surrounding Cardinal McCarrick’s abuse revelations. Taking a close look at how these organizations tell the story of sexual abuse in the church, particularly over the course of the events of 2018, reveals how Catholic news media outlets have interests in maintaining particular narratives of sexual abuse in the Church. These interests are political, personal, and theological, as they are informed and expressed from a Catholic perspective. The narratives these papers generate are at times congruent, but other times quite contentious to the point of calling each other out by name. This contention becomes dramatically apparent after the Register publishes a letter by Archbishop Carlo Viganò, former papal nuncio to the United States, calling for the resignation of Pope Francis. For the Reporter, there is a continual focus on clericalism, Church teachings they see as problematic, and Catholic power structures as the root of the problem of sexual abuse in the Church. They tend to write to and from a survivor-victim advocacy perspective. The Register regularly cites lax teachings on sexuality, a gay subculture in the priesthood, and cultural relativism as causes of rampant sexual abuse in and out of the Church. Their perspective tends more towards questions of theology and doctrine.