AUSTRALIA
The Conversation
Kathleen McPhillips
Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle
It’s a frontrunner to win Best Picture at the Oscars, has cleaned up the critics’ awards and won extraordinarily high ratings from filmgoers.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t seen the recent release Spotlight yet. In a summer dominated by the return of Star Wars, who wants to watch a movie about Boston journalists exposing the Catholic Church for decades of child abuse and cover ups?
But I hope more people do see it, because as the final moments of the film make clear, Spotlight is not just a movie about historic wrongs in one US city. It’s a story about too many people, in too many countries, including my home town of Newcastle, north of Sydney.
Australia’s current Royal Commission into institutional child abuse was set up after years of dogged work by survivors, supporters and journalists to uncover abuse across many institutions but particularly the Catholic Church. Like Boston, Australian towns where the Catholic church is dominant, such as Newcastle, Wollongong and Ballarat, have been badly affected.
When I went to see Spotlight in a Newcastle cinema on a Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t surprised by who else was in the audience: I recognised survivors, families and supporters of victims, and Catholic community members, including a number of priests.
But even as a researcher who’s attended and written about the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission and the NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Spotlight’s finale came as a shock.
Just before the final credits roll, the filmmakers list dozens of other American cities affected by clerical abuse, which have all been tracked by the website Bishop Accountability. That US list is followed by towns and cities worldwide. The names go on and on, over several screens: from Auckland, Beunos Aires and Cape Town, to Manchester to Manila and beyond.
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