RHODE ISLAND
Bruce DeSilva’s Rogue Island
I finally watched the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight tonight, and I had three strong emotional reactions: admiration for The Boston Globe’s investigative team, pride in the profession I labored in for more than four decades, and . . . guilt.
Why guilt?
One day in the 1970’s, I fielded a phone call in the newsroom of The Providence Journal. The caller was a local woman who told me that her ten-year-old son had been repeatedly molested by a Roman Catholic priest in one of the city’s parishes.
Later that week, I sat down with her and her son across from their kitchen table and listened to their story. It was both chilling and hard to accept. Her son said he wasn’t the only one—that two of his friends also had been abused. I asked the woman if she or the other parents had reported this to the Providence Police. She said they’d tried but that the police just scoffed and warned them that it was a crime to file a false police report.
As a journalist, I was skeptical by nature; but by the time I left them that evening, I believed what they’d told me was true. The next day, I consulted with an editor, one of the top guys who ran the paper. He labeled the story rubbish before I could even finish relating it.
I told him I understood why he was incredulous but that I thought it was worth looking into. He forbade it. No way the paper was going to slander a priest, he said. Besides, he added, even if the story were true, no one in Rhode Island (the most heavily Roman Catholic state in the union at the time) would believe it.
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