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Los Angeles Times (NOT Boston Globe) had first investigative journalists team reporting on clergy sexual abuse since 1985. Against mighty Jesuits & LA archdiocese – Cardinal Law was a cakewalk!
By Paris Arrow
PopeCrimes& Vatican Evils.
October 10, 2015
http://tinyurl.com/osjujkt
The movie Spotlight covers the five months leading to and culminating on the single day of January 6, 2002, when the Boston Globe published its first story on clergy abuse -- and then it list all the dioceses that had clergy abuse as its ending --- suggesting Boston Globe initiated exclusively the reporting on clergy sexual abuse that spread across the USA. But Los Angeles Times and others reporters from the Santa Barara Independent, the priest Tom Doyle in 1985 who wrote the initial complete report on clergy sexual abuse on minors, and Jason Berry who won journalistic awards for his reportage on clergy sexual abuse -- are the true pioneers in the journalistic coverage of clergy sexual abuse. Therefore, the claim of the movie Spotlight -- on behalf of Boston Globe -- that it was the FIRST investigative team of reporters (akin to the two initial journalists in Nixon's Watergate in the movie All the President's Men ) is outrageously erroneous and false. (No surprise there as Hollywood and the Vaitcan are twin cities that "lie for a living"!)
An NCR cover story reported that in 1985, a 92-page report on clergy sex abuse was distributed to U.S. bishops concerning more than 100 lawsuits that could predictably cost a billion dollars. Kristen Lombardi, writing in the Boston Phoenix, quoted Doyle as saying he had high hopes that the U.S. bishops would receive the report well. Doyle thought Boston Cardinal Bernard Law would play a key role. Cardinal Law at the time headed the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Research and Pastoral Practices. He would be the person to lobby the other bishops to bring the report to life. Doyle had known Law since the late 1960s. Therefore Cardinal Bernard Law was not naïve on this matter and was expecting for what he already knew 17 years ago -- BEFORE Boston Globe published anything. And it’s not as if he pointed guns at the heads of those journalists (which typical of Hollywood fabrication of music and drama, is exaggerated in the movie).
NCR May 17, 2002, Tom Fox wrote in his article "What they knew in 1985" Cover Story:
In light of these developments, a 92-page report on clergy sex abuse, distributed to the U.S. bishops in May 1985, warning them of the trouble ahead, has been repeatedly cited by victims’ attorneys as a hard measure of episcopal negligence. The document, reportedly referred to in more than 100 lawsuits, is well known to the bishops...
When the men turned over their findings to the bishops, it might have seemed extreme to some; today it reads as a prophetic document.
The Catholic church, the three men wrote, faces “extremely serious financial consequences” and “significant injury” to its image as a result of the “sexual molestation of children by clerics, priests, permanent deacons and transient deacons, nonordained religious, lay employees and seminarians.”
At the time the men finished the final draft of the report in June 1985, they noted, more than $100 million in claims had been made against just one diocese as a result of sexual contact between a priest “and a number of minor children.” The report said the settlement for seven cases, including fees and expenses, had exceeded $5 million, and that “the average settlement for each case was nearly $500,000.” It estimated that “total projected losses for the decade” could rise to $1 billion.
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The men also warned that television and newspaper reporters -- NCR was cited by name -- were already on to the story and that the American Bar Association and plaintiff lawyers were “conducting studies ... about this new, developing area of law.”
Kristen Lombardi, writing in the Boston Phoenix, quoted Doyle as saying he had high hopes that the U.S. bishops would receive the report well. Doyle thought Boston Cardinal Bernard Law would play a key role. Law at the time headed the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Research and Pastoral Practices. He would be the person to lobby the other bishops to bring the report to life. Doyle had known Law since the late 1960s, Lombardi reported, since the time Law served as bishop of the Springfield-Cape Girardeau diocese in Missouri.
The Boston archbishop, Doyle believed, could be counted on as a sympathetic ear. “I told Bernie, ‘This is our report,’ ” Doyle told Lombardi. “ ‘These are our recommendations. We need to get the conference to study this.’ ” Law “was very supportive,” Doyle said. He pledged to call for a special ad hoc committee to study the problem.
At the June 1985 meeting of the U.S. bishops at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., the bishops were quietly briefed on the report’s contents. But, according to Doyle, the committee headed by Law never followed through on the promise to create the ad hoc committee. (our added emphases)
While Boston Globe was only (at its infancy) and just beginning its coverage in Boston, Los Angeles Times was already publishing many stories about the Jesuits of Los Gabos and television and newspaper reporters were already on lawsuits stories.
Christine Johnson in her post in Hollywood Reporter says that she has been reporting on Jesuits pedophiles 1985 -- that's 17 years before Boston Globe -- see her comments below (with our highlights).
I reported Jesuit abuse of children in California in 1985.. I was one of many in California who confronted the archdiocese of Los Angeles and the Jesuits and their order..
A celibate gay Jesuit seminarian reported 8 Jesuit priests at the Jesuit Retreat in Los Gatos California in the 90’s for sexual harassment.. and he eventually won a settlement against them.. (it took fighting the Jesuits attempts to thwart the seminarian.
Several Jesuits raped male kitchen workers at the Jesuit retreat in los gatos.. very explicit articles were written in the LA Times about this (I have copies of the articles)
A Jesuit who taught at Loyola HS in California was in the news for raping both male and female relatives and even a Jesuit priest at Los Gatos who was punished by the Jesuits for telling about the abuse and mysteriously jumped off a state building to his death.. (the Jesuit who abused every one gerald Lindner
was seen with the victim right before he jumped….
Another Jesuit priest from Los Gatos California was arrested for dressing as a woman and luring young teens into his car for sex… these and many other articles on Jesuit abuse in California alone a re well documented… in news paper articles…
It’s important to all of us whose lives were ruined by rapist Jesuits and cover up by the Jesuits that the world knows that every state has numerous stories of sexual assault by catholic priests and that Boston was not the first and only diocese to expose this….
Am glad for the film..
I just want the world to know it is much bigger than boston and hundreds of thousands of advocates, victims, media, journalists (most not catholic and not Jesuit educate) were hard at work way before boston.. in fact we set the stage for boston..
True, anyone reading the LA Times or even the Catholic Tidings in LA in the late 80s through the 90's knew everything going on and all the issues. By 2000's the news was all the predators in the public school system. The Boston story stole the headlines from the real scandals in the public school system.
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