Boston: Truth and Complicity

UNITED STATES
The New York Review of Books

Garry Wills

Investigative reporting got a boost in 1976, after the movie All the President’s Men showed what a small team (two men) could do if an editor and owner like Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham at The Washington Post let them keep digging for a long time. Another such coup was brought off by The Boston Globe in 2002, when its own investigative team of four people, called “Spotlight,” broke the story of Cardinal Law’s protection of priests who sexually preyed on children. In this case, Spotlight, which normally chose its own subjects, had not followed up on leads fed to the paper. It took an outsider, Martin Baron (played by Liev Schreiber), who had become editor of the paper in 2001, to jog the team into action. Baron was sent by the Globe’s new owner, The New York Times, to trim costs, yet he spent heavily on the priestly abuses scandal. An instinctive deference to the Church had inhibited the press in this Roman Catholic city from recognizing a scandal in its own backyard. Baron was not subject to that thrall. He was initially thought of as outside the Boston culture—an unmarried man, a Jew, not interested in the sacred Boston Red Sox.

In Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight—which has received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Film and Best Director—The Boston Globe story has been given a movie treatment like that of The Washington Post story. Both films retain some of the clichés of such tales—the resistance of society to what the enterprising reporters are trying to do, the difficulty of prying evidence from fearful witnesses, the final victory of the good guys over powerful resistance. But there are many differences. Woodward and Bernstein were outside the normal political reporting of Washington. The “Spotlight Four,” though not churchgoers, were all Catholic-raised or influenced. The crimes being investigated were more personal and religious, combining sexual and theological inhibitions.

As the team begins, lethargically, to go into the one case that had been superficially handled in the Globe, the serial abuses and regular moves of Father John J. Geoghan, they saw that other priests had been treated the same way—four, they turned up; then eleven. In diocesan records they began tracing the patterns of such frequent shiftings-about for priests. They were stunned as they found that large numbers of priests fit the pattern. They called on Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and psychotherapist who has studied priestly sexual activity for decades. (He is a respected scholar whom I have consulted for my writing and speaking on priests.) He tells the Spotlight team over the phone (his voice supplied by the actor Richard Jenkins) that he had found a high quotient of predatory priests in America, almost uniformly protected by bishops, and by that quotient the number of offending priests in Cardinal Law’s domain would be ninety—which was eerily close to the number they had turned up in diocesan records—seventy-six.

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