UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Michelle Boorstein November 9
“Spotlight,” a new film about the Catholic clergy abuse scandal’s explosion in 2002, begs the question: How are things different in 2015?
Dozens of U.S. church leaders have in the past few days been offering answers in the form of public statements, with some primarily focusing on the survivors and others casting the scandal as fully in the past and framing the church as the leader today in a society that hasn’t fully dealt with the problem.
“Spotlight, which began playing in U.S. cities Nov. 6, tells the story of Boston Globe investigative journalists who broke the story. (The Globe’s editor at the time was Marty Baron, now executive editor of The Washington Post)
The range of views in the new statements – which follow a memo of talking points the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ sent to its dioceses in September — show the way the church still wrestles with how to tell its own story.
The movie “looks back at this historical past – 15 years and more as it dramatizes a newspaper investigation into abuse that occurred in the Boston area,” Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl wrote Nov. 2. “My wish is that other entities, like the public school systems, would attempt to do what the Church has done and offer the same level of protection to children in their care as we do.”
In the first line of a piece on “Spotlight” this weekend, Francesco C. Cesareo, chairman of the USCCB’s National Review Board, also expressed the view that the Catholic Church’s problems with sexual abuse echo those of society as a whole. …
Terry McKiernan, founder of a Boston-based abuse-tracking group bishopaccountability.org, said he doesn’t see child sex abuse as necessarily more prevalent in the Catholic Church. But he believes the reaction in the new statements about “Spotlight” reflect an ongoing problem.
“What if they had responded in a searching way? A radical way? Because there is so much left to do,” he said. “And I’d prefer they not take credit for something they did so reluctantly. It’s not something they innovated, they were forced into it.”
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