NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
By Rev. Alexander Santora/For the Jersey Journal
on November 17, 2015
It was a dreary, rainy, cold Tuesday evening last week when I trudged over to Union Square, Manhattan, to see, “Spotlight.” The film depicts The Boston Globe’s investigative unit uncovering the enormous sexual scandal in the Boston Archdiocese back in 2002.
Entering the theater just before endless trailers began, I was amazed to find not only a few seats left, but also that most of the audience was made up of young adults. The movie was only playing in one other uptown theater. After two hours and eight minutes, I was tempted to run up to the front of the theater and ask the people to stay seated so we could talk.
They could not leave the theater after the film ends with the publication of the front-page story on the Feast of Epiphany. The reporters from this unit come into work on that January Sunday, and the phones are ringing off the hook as perhaps scores of abuse victims are calling in their stories after reading the article. This Pulitzer Prize winning investigative unit of the newspaper, called Spotlight, uncovered not only that as many as 90 priests in the Boston area abused children and teens, but also that Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew for years about some of these priests and shuffled them from parish to parish where they abused again and again.
This audience, I thought, cannot leave thinking that this is the Catholic Church today. Or that nothing was ever done. Or that this was typical of every diocese, of all priests, and that Law was representative. But that was the power of this film. It wasn’t a propaganda film against the church. It touches on matters of celibacy and sealed settlements and clerical life, but it wasn’t taking a stand.
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