UNITED STATES
Royal Gazette (Bermuda)
Christopher White
A new film serves as a painful reminder of one of the darkest periods in Roman Catholic Church history, where more than 200 priests and religious were accused of abusing minors and were reassigned in a cover-up.
Spotlight, which won Best Picture at the Oscars on Sunday night, chronicles The Boston Globe’s groundbreaking coverage of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Archdiocese of Boston that would go on to win the paper a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
Reflecting on the ten-year anniversary of the Globe’s revelations, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley said that “the media helped make our Church safer for children by raising up the issue of clergy sexual abuse and forcing us to deal with it.”
And as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed in 2010: “The Catholic Church has always had enemies. … but Catholics — and especially Catholic leaders, from the Vatican to the most far-flung diocese — should welcome it, both as a spur to virtue and as a sign that their faith still matters, that their church still looms large over the affairs of men, and that the world still cares enough about Christianity to demand that Catholics live up to their own exacting standards.”
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