Sins of the father: unravelling moral authority in the Irish Catholic Church

It was not until the mid-1990s that the extent of child abuse within the Irish Catholic Church began to be investigated and reported by the Irish media, yet why did it take so long for these scandals to emerge? This article analyses how the Irish media investigated and reported on the Irish Catholic Church from a socio-historical perspective. Drawing from Bourdieu, analytical concepts of habitus, capital and field are employed to examine transformations in journalistic practice. By doing so, this article explores the symbolic power of the clergy in Catholic society and traces the erosion of their moral authority. The Bishop Eamonn Casey paternity scandal is analysed as a means of unpacking journalistic practice in the early 1990s, on the cusp of the widespread emergence of child sex abuse reports in the mainstream media. The case study builds from a series of semi-structured interviews with journalists who reported on clerical scandals, including religious affairs correspondents from the 1960s to present, and produces insight into the practices, perceptions and dispositions (habitus) of journalists over time. It is argued that the reporting of paternity scandals in the early 1990s reflects wider processes of social change taking place within the journalistic field and the religious field. While focusing on these specific fields as sites of inquiry, this study reveals the erosion of social and cultural barriers which finally led to the widespread reporting of clerical child abuse scandals in Ireland.