UNITED STATES
Good Men Project
By Peter Pollard
I sat in a theater in New York’s Times Square recently, soaking in every nuance of the film Spotlight. I already intimately knew the story of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s investigation of the Archdiocese of Boston’s cover-up of sexual abuse by scores of its priests. I knew most of the characters: the reporters, the survivors, the attorneys, the Archdiocese’s higher ups – I even caught a glimpse of the name of the priest who sexually abused me back in the mid-1960s on a list of priests under review.
But what moved me most was the two adolescent boys sitting near me in the theater. They were laughing at inappropriate places and nudging one another during some of the most poignant moments in the film. Just before I leaned over to reprimand them for their disrespect, I stopped, and considered the fact that they were there at all. Of 25 films showing that night in the multiplex, they’d chosen the one about sexual abuse by clergy.
The boys’ discomfort was palpable.
I realized then, that through the film, the Spotlight team’s tireless efforts were perhaps freeing two more souls from the belief that they were alone and powerless – just as the team’s long series of stories in 2002 had freed so many of us, who once felt hopeless that our experiences of betrayal by the Catholic hierarchy would ever come to light.
I remember clearly, twenty eight years ago this month, storming out of the Chancery Office of the Archdiocese of Boston, shouting over my shoulder “maybe I’ll go to the Boston Globe. “ My then-idle threat felt like the only leverage I had left after the Archdiocese refused to remove from active ministry the priest who had sexually abused me two decades earlier.
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