Tolerant of Libel? Turning the “Spotlight” on The Boston Globe

UNITED STATES
The Catholic World Report

September 3, 2017

Thomas J. Nash

Veteran reporter Michael Rezendes makes several incorrect—even libelous—assertions in his recent remarks about the scandal of priests’ fathering children.

In a 2002 series of articles, Michael Rezendes and his colleagues on The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team did the Catholic Church—and, by extension, society at large—a great service in bringing greater light to the problem of sexual abuse by some priests in the Church. The Globe’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning coverage ignited investigations that helped facilitate national and international reforms. Some Catholic would strongly reject any affirmation of the Globe, given the newspaper’s general bias against the Church. I recognize that bias, and yet I would argue there’s no doubt that God used the Globe’s talented journalists to help purify the Church, as surely as he employed in Old Testament times ancient Babylon to topple the corrupt Kingdom of Judah and thereby spur the reform of the Jewish people.

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