UNITED STATES/ROME
The Guardian (UK)
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome and Amanda Holpuch in New York
Friday 6 November 2015
When Cardinal Bernard Law was forced under public pressure to resign as archbishop of Boston in 2002, he was considered a pariah within the ranks of the American Catholic church.
In an editorial at the time, the Boston Globe – which had helped bring him down by exposing how the archdiocese had covered up years of sexual abuse by paedophile priests – said that Law had become the “central figure in a scandal of criminal abuse, denial, payoff and coverup that resonates around the world”.
The story behind the Globe’s exposé is the subject of a new film called Spotlight, which stars Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo and is being released in the US on Friday.
The movie is likely to revive questions about the church’s handling of sex abuse – both then and now – and revive memories of a painful period for abuse victims and millions of American Catholics.
But Law is likely to be insulated from any controversy: in the 13 years since his resignation, he has found a haven far from Boston, behind the walls of the Vatican.
At the time of his resignation, the cardinal was being pilloried publicly for having turned a blind eye to sex abuse, and embodying a culture that “reflexively placed the reputation of the church above the pain of victims”.
But for years, he served in an honorific role as the archpriest of the Basilica of the Santa Maria Maggiore until his retirement, at the age of 80, in 2011.
Today, Law enjoys the quiet life that any senior and retired cardinal living in Vatican City would: he is a fixture of the annual 4 July Independence Day party held by the US embassy to the Holy See, and was until recently considered an active and important conservative voice within many of the Vatican offices where he served. …
But for men like David O’Regan, who was abused by a member of the Boston archdiocese in the 1960s and suppressed the experience until the Boston Globe’s investigation made it public in 2002, Law is still a symbol of the church’s legacy of abuse.
“Being caught in [Law’s] lie, that was such a betrayal to me, because my faith meant so much to me,” he said.
Now serving as the New England director of the activist group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, O’Regan said that he was one of about 100 people who attended a Spotlight screening last week, organised by the film’s distributor, Open Road Films. There were several advance screenings of the film for clergy sex abuse survivors and their families and friends.
The anger and sadness O’Regan felt in 2002 was resurrected during the screening, but he said he is thankful for the film.
“I felt validation,” said O’Regan. “When we first came forward to the church, we were not believed, they minimised what happened to us.”
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