MASSACHUSETTS
CommonWealth
ANTONIO F.D. CABRAL
Feb 23, 2016
SPOTLIGHT, BOSTON’S OWN OSCAR NOMINEE FOR BEST PICTURE, highlighted the courageous work of Boston Globe reporters and editors that exposed the Catholic Church’s handling of clergy sexual abuse. The Globe’s reporting forced the issue of clergy sexual abuse onto the Commonwealth’s agenda, both culturally and politically.
Since the movie focused elsewhere, few of the movie’s fans know the political impact of the Globe’s work. I had a front row seat to Beacon Hill’s reaction to the Globe’s reporting as I’d been appointed the House chairman of the legislative committee that handled child abuse legislation just a few months earlier. While the story may not be Oscar worthy, the speed with which Massachusetts state government responded to the scandal, after years of inaction prior to the Globe’s reports, is a reminder that the legislative process, designed to be deliberative, can move quickly at times even in the face of long-standing opposition.
As Spotlight portrays, the issue of clergy sexual abuse was not unknown when the Globe published the first of its many stories on the church’s coverup on Jan. 6, 2002. For at least a decade, legislators had been filing bills in Massachusetts to include clergy in the Commonwealth’s mandated reporter law, section 51A of Chapter 119 of the Massachusetts General Laws. This law, enacted in the 1970s, requires those who hold certain jobs, generally the jobs which require interaction with children and their families, to immediately report the abuse of a child to law enforcement. Until 2002, religious officials, including priests, rabbis, etc., as well as their superiors, were exempt from this law.
A handful of victims of abuse by priests, like Phil Saviano who appears in the film, had been lobbying for these bills for years, testifying before the Legislature, trying unsuccessfully to get attention for the issue. At the time of the law’s passage in the 1970s and through the following decades leading up to the Globe’s reporting, the Catholic Church had a full-time lobbyist on Beacon Hill and these bills that would have added clergy to the list of mandated reporters never made it out of committee.
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