INDIA
The Citizen
SHOMA A.CHATTERJI
Wednesday, February 17,2016
Paying a tribute to a real life story on investigative journalism for a commercial Hollywood flick is not a common occurrence. Especially with reference to a story that is an expose on the Catholic Church and tackles the extremely fragile subject of child abuse. But it has happened and the film Spotlight (2015) will release across the country on Friday.
Directed by Academy-Award nominee Tom McCarthy, Spotlight is a taut, edge-of-the-seat thriller. Spotlight zeroes in on the Boston Globe investigations by its own Spotlight team of reporters and the series of stories published over one year on this fragile subject won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003. The story investigated into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church that revealed not only the abuse but more shocking was the decades-long cover-up at the highest levels of Boston’s religious, legal and government establishments that went to great lengths to see that the story did not get out and reach the public. The waves shook the entire world at the time. After the Spotlight team published its work, the team created a book about the events. Sacha Pfeiffer, one of the leading members of the team is a co-author of Betrayal: The Crisis of the Catholic Church. The consequences of this massive reveal rocked the world and had a ripple effect across the many major religious institutions.
In 2002, the Spotlight team published nearly 600 stories about sex abuse of children by more than 70 priests whose actions were concealed by the Catholic Church. In December 2002, Cardinal Law resigned from the Boston Archdiocese and was re-assigned to the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. 249 priests have been publicly accused of sexual abuse within the Boston Archdiocese. As of 2008, 1,476 victims survived priest abuse in the Boston area. Nationwide 6,427 priests have been accused of sexually abusing 17,259 victims. In the years since Spotlight’s report, sexual abuse by Catholic Church priests has been uncovered in 105 American cities and 102 dioceses world wide. (Source: www.bishop-accountability.org, a database compiled by Terry McKiernan)
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