UNITED KINGDOM
Catholic Herald
by Edward Condon posted Thursday, 28 Jan 2016
In the post-Vatican II Church notions of crime and justice had no place and abusers were labelled as victims
The film Spotlight, which opens in the UK this week, tells the story of the Boston Globe’s work in uncovering the child sex abuse scandal in that city. It has received, both here and in the United States, rave reviews and will, rightly, bring with it a revisiting of the terrible crimes which were committed, and covered up, in Boston, but also in many other dioceses.
For Catholics, this can be an occasion for mixed emotions: on the one hand, everyone shares the rage and revulsion which is the only possible response to the horrific pattern of abuse and denial which played out in so many places. On the other, there is a certain tribal resistance which many of us feel at the wider media broad-brush painting of the Church we love, and of which we have a totally different experience, as a monolithic embodiment of hypocrisy and evil. Neither feeling is unreasonable, nor are they mutually contradictory.
My own attempts to reconcile the two, in part, steered me towards my study of canon law, and penal law in particular. What I expected to learn was that canon law was part of the problem, that it was the mechanism which allowed for the crimes of child abusers to be ignored, excused, and covered up. It was a great relief discovering that the opposite was true; the pattern of abuse and cover up, so especially seen in Boston and Los Angeles, was not a product of canon law, nor even its abuse, but of its flagrant violation. Changes and updates were needed, but, broadly speaking, the law itself was sound and, had it been followed, we would not have seen the pattern of tragedy which we did in many places. But when a law can be ignored with impunity, however internally sound it may be, it cries out for reform.
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