MALTA
Times of Malta
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
by Martin Scicluna
I have just seen the film Spotlight. It tells the story in a calm and low key manner of the Boston Globe’s team of reporters and that newspaper’s tenacious and scrupulous exposure in 2002 of the most harrowing litany of child sex abuse crimes dating back 50 years in the Roman Catholic diocese of Boston.
The diocese had covered up the decades-long abuse at the highest levels in Boston’s religious, legal and state establishments, sparking off a wave of revelations around the world, leading the Vatican to consider similar allegations against some 3000 priests between 2001 and 2010.
The Diocese of Boston subsequently paid $85 million in compensation for the mental anguish and, in many cases, criminal violence inflicted on about 550 victims. The Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law, was subsequently forced to resign.
When asked to comment on the film, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, who served for eight years in the Vatican as the prosecutor of sexual abuse of minors by priests from 2002 (the same year as the Boston revelations), said that: “Disclosure of abuse is the best service that one can render the Church.”
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