UNITED STATES
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
GARY MASON
The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015
There’s a scene in the movie Spotlight in which a reporter played by actor Mark Ruffalo is arguing with his editor about why their newspaper, The Boston Globe, should publish the explosive story they’ve been working on rather than hold it for further corroboration.
“This is not just Boston,” says Mr. Ruffalo, referring to the vast tentacles of sexual abuse the paper has uncovered. “This is the whole country, the whole world. They [the Catholic Church] knew and they let it happen. It could’ve been you, it could have been me. It could have been any of us.”
It’s one of many moments in the film that gave me shivers. If you haven’t seen Spotlight, you should. It’s the true story of The Boston Globe’s groundbreaking probe of child abuse by priests in the Boston Catholic church. The reporting was carried out by the paper’s investigation unit called Spotlight and earned The Boston Globe a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. The exposé did nothing less than blow the lid off the far-reaching network of sexual abuse that had been going on in the church for decades. The stories also revealed the institutional corruption that existed in the church hierarchy that allowed it all to happen.
I consider myself as lucky as Michael Rezendes, the Catholic and Boston-raised Globe reporter whom Mr. Ruffalo depicts in movie. I, too, grew up Catholic and regarded the priest I assisted each morning as an altar boy akin to God. I eventually grew out of my devotion to black robes and morning mass and escaped from that period of my life relatively unscathed. Others weren’t so fortunate. One of the priests I regularly served mass with was a pedophile. He would be convicted on three counts of gross indecency involving minors but likely hurt far, far more children than that.
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