UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Bob Smietana
March 3

Last night I sat on the couch, turned on a rented copy of “Spotlight” and thought of my Uncle Jimmy.

Wish he’d been there to watch with me.

We didn’t talk much about religion at family gatherings when I was growing up. But when we did, it was loud.

The debate I remember most: the one about the case of the Rev. James Porter.

Porter, who died in 2005, spent more than decade in jail for abusing dozens of children. He admitted abusing as many as 100 kids, most from the diocese of Fall River, about an hour south of Boston.

In the early 1990s, however, Porter’s case was dismissed as “aberrant,” as Cardinal Bernard Law told the Boston Globe in 1992.

Not long after news of Porter’s misdeeds broke in the early 1990s, I sat at the table…