UNITED STATES
Vanity Fair
BY MARTIN BARON
NOVEMBER 30, 2016
Monday, the second-annual Hitchens Prize—honoring the memory and legacy of the late Vanity Fair contributing editor and columnist Christopher Hitchens—was given to Marty Baron, Executive Editor of The Washington Post, at a dinner held at New York City’s Waverly Inn.
The prize, awarded by the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation, is bestowed upon a journalist or author whose work reflects a commitment to free expression, a depth of intellect, and an unwavering pursuit of the truth. This year’s citation acknowledged Baron’s long career in journalism and his work as editor of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. …
After the release of the movie Spotlight, I was often asked how we at The Boston Globe were willing to take on the most powerful institution in New England and among the most powerful in the world, the Catholic Church.
The question really mystifies me—especially when it comes from journalists or those who hope to enter the profession. Because holding the most powerful to account is what we are supposed to do.
If we do not do that, then what exactly is the purpose of journalism?
God forbid we take on the weaker institutions, the weaker individuals, while letting the strongest ones off the hook only because they can forcefully fight back.
A day before I started work at The Boston Globe in the summer of 2001, I read something startling. It was a column by The Globe’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Eileen McNamara. She wrote about the case of John Geoghan. He was a priest. Geoghan had been accused of abusing as many as 80 children. It was shocking. So I read closely.
The column detailed how the attorney for the survivors—those victimized by the priest—had asserted that the cardinal himself, Cardinal Bernard Law, knew about this priest’s repeated abuse and yet continued to reassign him from one parish to the next—notifying no one, not the parish priest and certainly not the parishioners, that a priest known to have committed sexual assaults would serve in ministry at their church.
Those were the allegations of the plaintiffs’ attorney. But the attorneys for the Church called those allegations baseless and irresponsible.
And then Eileen ended her column by saying the truth might never be known because the internal Church documents that could reveal the truth were under court seal. …
Well after our first story was published in January 2002, I received a letter from Father Thomas P. Doyle, who had waged a long and lonely battle within the Church on behalf of abuse victims. He wrote this: “This nightmare would have gone and on were it not for you and the Globe staff. As one who has been deeply involved in fighting for justice for the victims and survivors for many years, I thank you with every part of my being.
“I assure you,” he wrote, “that what you and the Globe have done for the victims, the Church and society cannot be adequately measured. It is momentous and its good effects will reverberate for decades.”
There is a lesson in Father Doyle’s letter: The truth is not meant to be hidden. It is not meant to be suppressed. It is not meant to be ignored. It is not meant to be disguised. It is not meant to be manipulated. It is not meant to be falsified. Otherwise, wrongdoing will persist.
I kept Father Doyle’s letter on my desk in Boston until the day, four years ago, that I left to join The Washington Post. It served as a reminder of what brought me to journalism and what kept me in it. And as a reminder of the work we as journalists must always do.
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