No one would accuse the Catholic Church of being the fastest or most innovative corporation in the world.  When you’ve been around for almost 2,000 years, you tend to do things at your own speed. Still, it’s been disheartening (to put it mildly) to see how slowly, awkwardly, and defensively the Church has responded to this latest round of scandal involving its employees accused of molesting customers.

I use the terms “employees” and “customers” to draw an analogy to the business world.  What would the average business do if one of its employees were accused of molesting children? At a minimum, it’s safe to say the employee would be suspended immediately and the business would cooperate with authorities and take steps to compensate the victim, financially or otherwise.  Priests are employees of the Church, and the children and other parishioners they serve are surely customers.  And yet, you’d get a more sincere apology from an airline that lost your bag than it appears victims of abuse are getting from the Church.  Recent pronouncements from the Vatican suggest that it’s the victim of all this negative attention.  Give me a break.

It’s been almost 30 years since the Tylenol poisonings, when Johnson & Johnson turned “crisis communications” into a specialty of corporate public relations.  It’s been 30 years since CNN created 24/7 television media coverage.  And it’s been more than a decade since the Internet made communications virtually instantaneous and gave individuals the power to demand and expect corporate transparency.  Hello, Rome! Obfuscation, equivocation, and corporate paternalism don’t fly any more.

Here’s one rule of crisis communications: get the bad news behind you as quickly as possible. This abuse situation has enveloped the Church for coming on ten years, and if you start counting when some children first complained to the authorities, it’s been over 40 years.

Here’s another rule, not only for crisis communications, but for corporate reputations generally: if you want to avoid scandal, try behaving—and make sure your employees behave—in a manner that is above reproach and that can withstand the inevitable public scrutiny.  Just saying you are doing God’s work doesn’t make it so.