UNITED STATES
USA Today
William F. Baker February 23, 2016
It is just a single line of dialogue from Spotlight, up for Best Picture and five other Academy Awards this Sunday, but it could be a movie in itself. It’s an allusion to an entire unknown chapter in the history of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals: the role of the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) in first uncovering the clerical conspiracy to shield abusing priests.
“Have you read Jason Berry’s book? He wrote about the Gauthe case,” an abuse survivor asks the team of investigative reporters featured in the film.
The survivor, Phil Saviano as portrayed by Neal Huff, holds up a copy of Berry’s 1992 book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, which expanded on Berry’s reporting for the Times of Acadiana in partnership with the NCR.
The June 7, 1985, edition of the NCR was earth-shattering. Berry — whose child had recently been baptized Catholic — published a lengthy piece on Father Gilbert Gauthe’s sexual crimes and their concealment by the highest clerical authorities in Gauthe’s diocese in Lafayette, La. In the same issue, reporter Arthur Jones detailed the concealment of pedophile priests throughout America, and NCR wrote an editorial accusing American Catholic bishops of systemic inaction and silence.
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