By Isaac Ato MENSAH
Accra- 26 September, 2018.
The unanswered question in John 18:38 from the New Testament Bible formed the basis of several days of debate among my friends and I as young undergrad students.
‘If Jesus had given an answer it would have settled the debate forever,’ a friend of mine offered. We ended the debate, acknowledging our cluelessness.
This truth debate flashed back when the Institute of Public Relations (IPR)- Ghana press conference held last week and the German Catholic church conference of this week hit the news.
In this season of truths as we call it on our blog, there are battles everywhere over allegations and truths and counter allegations.
Both IPR-Ghana and the German Catholic Church are in very serious crisis.
IPR-Ghana has as its tagline, ‘Image is everything’.
We can all put the proper spin on what this tagline really means and its appropriateness.
But what is the truth facing IPR-Ghana and its individual and corporate members today, especially concerning its individual and corporate members involved in the Ghana banking scandal?
“The recent issues in the financial sector of our country point to the basic fact that the loss of our value system can be blamed for bad corporate governance,” Ms Elaine Sam, IPR-Ghana president said in Accra on 17 September.
While launching the IPR week celebrations scheduled to take place in October in Winneba, she also stated that lack of respect for authority, loss of personal integrity and deliberate disregard for national symbols must be addressed for national development. She asked the media to educate people and shape the attitudes of people.
We wish to assure her that as a PR organisation, we shall do our part.
Julian Baggini writing in the guardian last Tuesday on www.theguardian.com stated, ‘Most people do not consciously articulate the philosophical assumptions they have absorbed and are often not even aware that they have any, but assumptions about the nature of self, ethics, sources of knowledge and the goals of life are deeply embedded in our cultures and frame our thinking without our being aware of them’.
Then after quoting the 19th-century Scottish Sinologist James Legge who stated ‘Confucius did not think his purpose was “to announce any new truths, or to initiate any new economy. It was to prevent what had previously been known from being lost”, Baggini concluded,
‘At the very least, there is a contradiction in saying there are no universal truths, since that is itself a universal claim about the nature of truth’.
Now back to the German Catholic Bishops Conference taking place in Fulda, Germany this week.
‘Many people don’t believe in us any longer’, said Cardinal Reinhard Marx, head of the German Catholic church as reported on ww.theguardian.com Tuesday.
Why?
Kate Connolly reports in The Guardian that the church itself ordered investigations into sexual abuses by priests and it has emerged, ‘While some bishoprics had cooperated thoroughly, others had not’.
There was censorship, some documents that would have been useful to the research team were censored, hidden, manipulated or destroyed.
It is instructive that the report commissioned by the church itself includes 38 thousand anonymous documents and we shall see how the lawyers argue it out in court when the German authorities begin prosecutions.
Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, the government-appointed envoy for sexual abuse of children is calling on the Catholic church to give unfettered access to its archives, which it has so far denied to the very research team it appointed, so that every allegation could be investigated.
This is also very interesting for Ghana and the world because the prevailing doctrine is that he who alleges must prove.
The leaked report on the investigations reveal that every sixth attack involved a rape; 83 percent of the sexual abuse and rape attacks were planned.
So what we say to our public relations practitioners, the shepherds overseeing the abused flock in Germany and to all of us is, the truth is unchanging, it is in our hearts.
Any communication strategy – be it from the German Catholic church or Ghanaian PR Practitioners – that thrives on just protecting a phantom public image, but not based on truth, on God’s natural law written in our hearts, is already judged by our hearts as false.
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