AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
February 26, 2016
Joanne McCarthy
Gold Walkley-winning Fairfax journalist Joanne McCarthy, whose reporting of church abuse cover-ups sparked the royal commission, reveals the moment in the movie Spotlight that left her in tears.
About the time Cardinal George Pell sits in a chair in the Hotel Quirinale in Rome on Monday to give evidence about his knowledge of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, celebrities will be climbing into limousines in Hollywood to attend the 88th Academy Awards.
Leonardo DiCaprio will be there, for his role in the violent historic action film The Revenant. George Clooney will be there too, because the Academy Awards wouldn’t be the Academy Awards without him.
Someone will wear Prada. Someone else will wear Tom Ford or Armani, Versace, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein or Dolce & Gabbana, and a few will be pilloried for looking a fright.
Tom McCarthy (no relation) will be there, nominated for best director and best original screenplay for his film Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s exposure of systemic child sexual abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic diocese of Boston from a first article on January 6, 2002.
Pell will probably have finished giving evidence, in Rome, to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse sitting in Sydney, when the best picture nominees are read out in Hollywood on Monday afternoon, Sydney time – a list that includes Spotlight. …
Watching Spotlight was like watching my life for the past 10 years.
The similarities were striking.
The Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, who initiated the investigation into the church’s handling of one paedophile priest, John Geoghan, was an outsider – a Miami Jew in a Catholic baseball-mad city.
I was, and remain, an outsider – a woman writing from home on the NSW Central Coast, 90 kilometres from Newcastle about the blokey Hunter Region. The outsider view was essential in both cases; to see with fresh eyes a culture linked with the church by tradition, where so many people in prominent positions grew up within the church.
I’ve met so many people like the victim and victim’s advocate Phil Saviano who spoke to the Boston Globe journalists. Saviano had documents to prove what he was saying, but he was labelled crazy because of his desperate passion for someone to see the church through the eyes of a survivor – not what the church said, but what it actually did behind closed doors.
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