UNITED STATES
Hamilton and Griffin on Rights
One fall morning in 2001 I was sitting with Dick Sipe in a hotel coffee shop in Oklahoma City. We were both there for depositions in a case in which we were both expert witnesses. Not long after we sat down Dick asked me “Have you talked to Mike Rezendes yet?” I told him I hadn’t and what’s more, I didn’t know who he was. Dick proceeded to tell me that Mike was an investigative reporter with the Boston Globe and had been talking to him for information on clergy abuse cover-up in the Archdiocese of Boston. “I gave him your name. He’ll be calling you soon. This is really big”
Mike did in fact call me very soon after my visit to Oklahoma City. I was in the Air Force then stationed in Germany but back in the States on a short leave. Before the end of our first conversation I was impressed. This guy really “gets it.” He’s gutsy, very bright and most important, committed to finding the truth.
I already knew the foundation of the story. In March 2001 Kristen Lombardi, then with the Boston Phoenix, was doing a story about the cover- up of the late John Geoghan’s serial sex abuse of young boys in the archdiocese of Boston and the serial cover-up by Cardinal Law and his staff. Her story came out with a full-page picture of Cardinal Law on the cover. It was a great story and had a very important effect but nothing like the nuclear reaction caused by the cover story published by the Boston Globe on Sunday, January 6, 2002…the Feast of the Epiphany.
I happened to be back in the U.S. the first week of January 2002. I was at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama at a continuing education program for officers. I had remained in contact with Mike and had a head’s up that the story was coming out on January 6. It was a major, major explosion in the seemingly never-ending exposure of the Catholic Church’s bungling of the sexual and spiritual violation of minors by the clergy.
January 6 was only the beginning. I cynically expected that the explosion would dominate the news, put some well-deserved fear into the bishops and wake up the complacent laity for a while and then after a couple weeks things would go back to the way they had been. There had been other explosions that we thought would cause a significant shakeup…..the Fr. Porter scandal in 1993, the revelation of widespread sex abuse of young seminarians at St. Anthony’s Seminary in California and St. Lawrence Seminary in Wisconsin, also in 1993 and then the Rudy Kos trial in 1997. This time I was wrong, very wrong. The aftershocks from the Globe’s Spotlight investigations are still happening. People have tried to figure out why the Boston phenomenon was different from anything else but it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Martin Baron, the Globe’s editor, had the insight to see that the real story was about the Archdiocese’s systemic, destructive response to the victims and had the courage to take on the ultra-formidable Catholic Church to find the truth. What does matter is that the Spotlight Team had the brilliance, courage, determination and just plain guts to keep digging until the mind-boggling reality of what was really happening in the Archdiocese was forced into the light.
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