UNITED STATES
Baptist News
OPINION
BILL LEONARD | MARCH 24, 2016
“This was like God showing up.” That’s how one victim of clergy sexual abuse in the Boston archdiocese described his family’s response when a priest came to visit. He added fatefully, “When a priest paid attention to you it was a big deal.” Unfortunately, in this case and hundreds like it, such attention was actually a way of “grooming” Catholic children for abuse.
Those stories come tumbling out in the Oscar-winning motion picture Spotlight, an account of a group of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe who uncovered multiple cases of clergy abuse and the efforts of certain members of the church hierarchy to cover up the practices year after year. It is a lesson in ecclesiastical evil, individual and institutional, with implications for all Christian communions.
Spotlight is the name of the Globe’s four-person research team. Lapsed Catholics all, they were charged by the paper’s new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) with in-depth research into accounts of clerical abuse surfacing in the Boston area. The reporters, led by Walter (Robby) Robinson (Michael Keaton), initially resisted, suggesting that it was only a case of “a bad apple” priest or two. They warned the new editor that his willingness to sue the archdiocese in order to secure church records would be political suicide in a Catholic town like Boston. And indeed it was. In one of many powerful scenes, Baron visits with Boston prelate Bernard Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), who gives the Jewish editor a copy of the Catechism and tells him: “This city flourishes when its great institutions work together.” To which Baron responds that newspapers are at their best when they “stand alone.”
Ultimately, the Spotlight team digs in, documenting case after case of serial child molestation by multiple priests, most moved from parish to parish, or sent to church-based half-way houses, “protected” by church officials. Small cash settlements were provided, paid after pledges of secrecy from the families. In the end, their Pulitzer Prize winning story was released in 2002, detailing the extent of the abuse and tracing protectionist actions all the way to Cardinal Law. Forced out of his archbishopric, Law was transferred to Rome and installed as Archpriest at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, an office he holds to this day.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.