UNITED STATES
National Catholic Register
by STEVEN D. GREYDANUS 11/20/2015
In a crucial sequence in Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight, a victim of sexual abuse by a priest telling his story to a Boston Globe reporter says simply, “Then he molested me.”
The reporter, Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), looks at him empathically. “I think language is going to be so important here,” she prompts gently. “Just saying ‘molest’ isn’t enough. People need to know what happened.”
We cloak the monstrous in euphemisms. We call it “unspeakable” or “unthinkable” — designations that are accurate simply because in using them we make them so. In Catholic circles a dozen years ago, one sometimes heard about “The Crisis”; later it became “The Scandal.” We all knew what these terms referred to, but did we really know?
Did we picture scenes like Spotlight’s queasy prologue: an assistant DA arriving at a police station, late at night, where a detained priest has been deferentially placed in the break room, the press sent away, while a bishop soothingly assures reeling family members that the offending cleric will be removed, and this will never, ever happen again? Did we think about how routinely such scenes played out in police stations for years and years?
Did we think about the lawyers employed by Church authorities to facilitate private mediations with families so there would be no bookings, no charges, no court records, no paper trail? The testimony from victims, witnesses and whistleblowers that was buried, suppressed or just plain ignored?
“If it takes a village to raise a child,” flamboyant lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) says, “it takes a village to abuse one.” That’s not true, of course, but it may take a village to let the same abusers get away with it again and again.
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