The Catholic Church, scandal and media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When all the numbing details of the [Dublin] report are absorbed, we have to reassemble the big picture of the institutional church's relationship with Irish society. And we have to say that relationship itself has been an abusive one. The church leadership behave towards society with the same callousness, the same deviousness, the same exploitative mentality and the same blindly egotistical pursuit of its own desires that an abuser shows towards his victim. (Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times 28 November 2009) Over the last 25 years, revelations of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy have given rise to one of the greatest institutional scandals of modern history. Sexual abuse by Catholic clergy has been reported across all five continents, though the countries that have received most attention are located in the ‘First World’, including the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and more recently, Germany, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Malta, Italy and Switzerland (Keenan, 2012: 3). The media played a key role in raising awareness of clerical child abuse in these countries by bringing this hitherto taboo subject to a mass audience and by campaigning for public inquiries into the church's handling of allegations. Moreover, in decrying the ‘evils’ of child abuse, the media acted as society's moral arbitrator, a role previously occupied by the church itself. In this chapter we explore the role of the media in exposing clerical child abuse in Ireland, focusing in particular on how a series of television documentaries paved the way for two major inquiries (Ferns and Dublin) and on the media's subsequent coverage of the inquiry reports. We look at how the controversy surrounding the clerical child abuse inquiries embodied key features of an ‘institutional scandal’: social norms were transgressed leading to moral outrage; the actions of individuals brought the Catholic Church as a whole into disrepute; and allegations of institutional ‘cover-ups’ proved to be as damaging as the acts they sought to conceal. The process of ‘scandal inflation’, whereby the media keeps a story alive by finding new ‘angles’ and ‘unveiling even more bizarre or aberrant behaviours’ (Butler and Drakeford, 2003) is also considered in relation to media coverage of the inquiries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".