Pope Benedict: Leading the church through crisis
Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he will resign at the end of the month, due to health issues.
As the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict has been the leader of a troubled brand, as the church was hit hard by the clergy-sex-abuse scandals.
What many people will remember about Pope Benedict, like his predecessor, is the way the church handled those incidents.
“So in that respect, I don’t think he handled his brand — his corporate brand — very well,” says Magali Tardy-Guyot is the head of strategy at FutureBrand Paris.
She says one of the golden rules in brand management is reacting to a crisis quickly and openly. She doesn’t think the church didn’t that and many unhappy Catholics left as a result.
Bernard Beatty is with the School of Divinity at University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. He says Pope Benedict made clear he didn’t want to run the church like a business.
“Bascially, he thinks the only thing you can do is what Christians can always ever do,” says Beatty. “You’ve got to return to the idea of living by faith, not living by managerial ideas or semi-political ideas of how you increase your membership, how you control your membership.”
The Vatican says it hopes to have a successor in place by Easter.
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