BOSTON (MA)
Catholic Culture
By Phil Lawler
Nov 06, 2015
In the new film Spotlight, which opens this weekend, the investigative reporters of the Boston Globe are portrayed as brave underdogs who dared to confront the overwhelming power of the Boston archdiocese, and thus exposed the sex-abuse scandal. It might make for a good movie (I wasn’t invited to the previews), but that story line is bunk.
The Globe did do the Catholic Church an enormous favor with the “Spotlight” series that opened in January 2002, revealing how the archdiocese had protected a predatory priest, the late John Geoghan, allowing him to continue molesting children for years. That Globe story—and the dozens of similar stories that came tumbling out in that “long Lent” of 2002—revealed a cancer within the Catholic clergy. The diagnosis of cancer is never welcome, but if an accurate diagnosis leads to proper treatment, it can be a blessing.
So give the Globe credit for some solid investigative journalism. But do not pretend, for the sake of the plot line, that the Globe was reluctant to do battle with the Catholic Church, or that it required a special sort of courage to do battle with the archdiocese. Quite the contrary. For years the Globe had been the most virulently anti-Catholic major newspaper in the country. And by the early years of the 21st century, when this drama opened, the Globe had achieved an unquestioned dominance as the single most powerful institution in the public life of Greater Boston: far more powerful than the Church. (If you doubt me, make a list of the political candidates who won Massachusetts elections in the 1990s, and ask yourself whether the views of those candidates more closely reflected the teachings of the Catholic Church or the editorial directives of the Boston Globe.) This was not a case of David vs. Goliath; or if it was, Goliath won.
As an antidote to Hollywood fantasies that could make Spotlight misleading, I recommend Sins of the Press, a little book self-published by an investigative reporter who really is an underdog, David Pierre.
Let me stipulate at the outset that I do not always agree with Pierre. In his determination to demonstrate the bias of the Globe he sometimes fails to give credit where credit is due. In his zeal to protect the Church from unjust criticism he sometimes defends the indefensible. Still the defects of his approach serve as a counterbalance to the politically-correct approach of the Globe and the fawning early reviews of Spotlight.
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