UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Steve and I went yesterday to see “Spotlight.” Most of you will already know quite a bit about this film, but in case anyone reading this blog doesn’t have information about it, it’s a depiction of the dramatic story of the gradual awakening of the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team to the massive ramifications of the abuse story in the Catholic church. It’s the story of how, after having been alerted to this by abuse survivors like Phil Saviano of SNAP, the Globe ignored the situation until reports about a single monstrously abusive priest in the Boston archdiocese, John Geoghan, alerted Globe journalists to the fact that there were more abusive priests in the diocese — as many as 90 — hiding in plain sight, whose histories of abuse were known to all kinds of powerful people but above all to the diocese’s chief shepherd Cardinal Law, but about whom no one with power to combat the abuse had done anything at all.
These revelations led to the Globe’s historic exposé report in 2002 that ultimately toppled Cardinal Law, who was then “punished” by the Vatican by being whisked away to Rome where he was given a cushy and powerful job within the Vatican. If you want to know more about “Spotlight,” here’s the Facebook page for the movie. And here’s its Twitter site.
Our reaction: we drove away from the theater talking about how the U.S. Catholic bishops just met to ratchet up their attacks on same-sex marriage as an “intrinsic evil,” a position they plan to place before Catholic voters in the U.S. in a voting guide designed to herd voters into the GOP voting column. Steve and I and couples like us, same-sex couples who choose to commit our lives to each other in public, loving marital relationships, are evil. Not what the bishops have done: that is not evil.
As I told Steve as we talked about this, and have told friends on Facebook, it’s astonishing to me that, just as a movie appears in theaters everyhere shining a spotlight on the direct involvement of a majority of Catholic bishops in covering for priests sexually molesting minors, the bishops have chosen to shine their own spotlight on my life and Steve’s life as evil lives. Talk about moral obtuseness of the most intractable form imaginable. Talk about a total lack of self-knowledge or insight into one’s own life and behavior undercutting claims to pastoral responsibility in the grossest way possible.
Talk about not seeing what is right in front of one’s nose as one chooses to focus, instead, on imaginary (and politically useful) bugbears everywhere around oneself.
Here’s what else struck me as I watched:
1. I find it amazing — marvelous, really — that a marginal, embattled organization of abuse survivors and advocates for survivors, the heroic folks who formed SNAP, has gone in two decades from being marginal and embattled to being celebrated in a major movie playing in theaters all over the place this (American) holiday season. This movie is in key respects a paean to SNAP leaders including Phil Saviano and Richard Sipe, a richly deserved paean to them for their willingness to keep on keeping on when no one, including the Globe itself, would pay any attention to them when they first came forth with their explosive reports about the ramification of the abuse situation in the Catholic church.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.