UNITED KINGDOM
Catholic Herald
by Francis Phillips posted Friday, 19 Feb 2016
‘Betrayal’ is a grim story but every Catholic should read it
I have just been reading a grim book: Betrayal (Profile Books, £8.99).
First published in 2002, it has now been reissued and updated to coincide with the release of the film Spotlight. For those few remaining people who might not know what the film is about, the Spotlight team were a small group of investigative reporters on the Boston Globe newspaper, who first alerted America to the systemic sexual abuse of young people by a small group of priests in the Boston archdiocese.
Almost the worst feature of this harrowing saga was that Cardinal Law, archbishop of Boston, had known about this abuse yet had constantly moved the priests involved from parish to treatment centre and from treatment centre back to another parish.
Those who did follow the story at the time and as it unfolded in other US dioceses and around the world, will know the main factors of this scandal: abusive priests were seen as sinful rather than criminal, and capable of changing their behaviour; the Church’s concern was to hush up the problem and to protect the institution at all costs; and the great majority of the Boston victims were post-pubescent teenage boys (whereas paedophilia is attraction to pre-pubescent children).
In 2001 the Spotlight team was first alerted to the now notorious case of Father John Geoghan and set out to determine “whether the Geoghan case was an anomaly or part of a pattern”. In the course of their investigations they discovered that Cardinal Law had secretly settled cases where 70 priests had been accused of sexual abuse. After legal proceedings the archdiocese finally gave the prosecutors the names of more than 90 priests.
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