UNITED STATES
National Review
by KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ
A movie that should be a catalyst for prayer, healing, and forgiveness Thank God for the Boston Globe.
Thank God for Spotlight. I watched Spotlight, the movie about the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting that uncovered a clerical-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan one Sunday morning after Mass this fall. I went right after a morning Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
I cried watching that movie. I looked around and saw sorrow. I couldn’t help wondering if someone around me had been hurt by someone who professed to be a man of God. As a member of the body of Christ, which is what the Church is, I wanted to embrace her or him, a son of God, a daughter of God, a brother or sister in Christ. I wanted everyone there to hear the words of Pope Francis during a Mass with people who had been abused by priests in Ireland, Britain, and Germany: “Before God and his people I express my sorrow for the sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse committed against you.
And I humbly ask forgiveness.” It’s been more than a decade since the Boston Globe shined light in the darkest of places. The Church is a different place now. As my friend Ed Mechmann, who runs the Safe Environment program in the Archdiocese of New York, put it in the New York Times, “The Catholic Church in America has done something no other organization in the world has done — we’ve made a huge, across-the-board change in our corporate culture so that now every leader and every worker has child protection as a high item on his agenda. And we’ve been a great success.”
The story Spotlight doesn’t tell is the one that comes after — “a story about learning from tragic mistakes and then committing to a course of transformation,” in Mechmann’s words.
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