UNITED STATES
Casper Star-Tribune
By Michael Reagan
If you’ve seen the excellent movie “Spotlight,” you know what it takes for a newspaper to expose the sexual abuse of children by priests in the Catholic Church.
“Spotlight,” which recently won the Academy Award for best picture, is the true story of how the Boston Globe’s investigative Spotlight team uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the Boston Archdiocese.
Challenging one of the most powerful institutions in Boston, digging up the ugly truth and detailing it on Page 1 took a strong mix of principle and guts by the Globe’s editor, Marty Baron.
Many journalists around the country before him had heard similar charges about priests repeatedly molesting children in their cities and towns, but they had done nothing.
The Globe’s in-depth investigation, which began in 2001, made headlines around the world, shamed the Boston Archdiocese and shook the entire Catholic Church to its core.
It set off a series of exposes in other cities that proved that the problem the Catholic Church — my church — was having with serial pedophiles was nothing new or restricted to Boston.
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