Abstract

Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (SACC) is most likely one of the greatest challenges for this institution. The article presents the results of an exploratory study on the journalistic coverage of SACC carried out by three Italian daily newspapers to reflect on the way they are represented and the role of the press in socially constructing the phenomenon. The article presents a review of the international literature and theoretical background, and reports evidence from a statistical analysis of the textual content of a corpus of 500 articles between 2018-2022, highlighting four main frames: the «empathic approach», the «critical approach», the «institutional and protective approach» and the «news and criminal approach».