As the movie Spotlight generates early Oscar buzz, two local Roman Catholic bishops are trying to get ahead of the potential chatter it could renew about the church’s response to the sex abuse scandal.
Spotlight, which will open this weekend in Northeast Ohio, is a drama about Boston Globe investigative journalists digging into the sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. The Globe’s prize-winning series of articles in 2002 led to even broader inquiries into the church around the country, including in Cleveland.
In anticipation of the film’s showing, Catholic Diocese of Youngstown Bishop George V. Murry and Catholic Diocese of Cleveland Bishop Richard G. Lennon, a native Bostonian, are reminding clergy and parishioners of what is being done to ensure the safety of children and youth in their dioceses.
Lennon came to Cleveland in 2006 from Boston, where he was the church’s interim leader for seven months, after Cardinal Bernard Law stepped down in 2002 amid the priest sex abuse scandal. Ordained an auxiliary bishop in September 2001, Lennon served as rector of St. John’s Seminary from January 1999 to December 2002 during the time of the Globe’s investigation. He is not a character in Spotlight.
In a letter penned Nov. 14, Murry said “it must be stated again that the abuse of an innocent child is an unspeakable evil for which we, the Church, continually must express our sorrow and ask for forgiveness for not handling this well in the past.”
“Learning from those mistakes, we have been and will continue to be aggressive in confronting this problem and rooting out perpetrators from among the clergy,” he said.
In response to the Boston Globe’s reporting of abuse and the cover-up of it in the Archdiocese of Boston, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002.
The charter, which was revised in 2011 to reaffirm the bishops’ commitment to keeping children and youth safe within the church, required all dioceses to implement programs to address sexual abuse and outlined procedures for handling allegations of abuse by clergy and strategies for accountability, healing and prevention of abuse. The charter has been implemented in both dioceses, which have child protection policies in place.
“The diocese acknowledges the role of the Boston Globe reporters in bringing this issue forward for necessary action, and we continue to pray for the victims of abuse and their families,” said Lennon in a prepared statement. “No other institution in the world is more committed to the safety and protection of children than the Catholic Church in the United States.”
The film has raised hackles in some circles, including with the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Its president, William Donohue, has repeatedly raised questions about the film, the Globe and even coverage of the movie. While the movie is clearly set more than a decade ago, when the Globe made its investigation, Donohue has argued that it adds to a larger, media-driven perception “that the sexual abuse scandal in the Church never ended” when he contends “the sexual abuse of minors by priests has long ceased to be an institutional problem.”
The movie follows the Globe’s Spotlight team of reporters as they slowly begin to find that what at first appeared to be one priest abusing young people leads to a handful of priests, then more than a dozen, then dozens. It ends with the publication of the Globe’s first article from its investigation.
The team is led by Walter Robinson, played by Oscar-nominated actor Michael Keaton, who attended Kent State in 1971-72. Robinson is at once a power at the Globe — where his team chooses its own assignments and takes their time doing them — and a classic Bostonian, Catholic-school educated and well connected in the community.
But Robinson and his reporters (played by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James) are facing changes at the paper, where outsider Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) is newly in charge — and has no particular affection for or loyalty to Boston’s hierarchies, including the church. It is Baron who urges the Spotlight team to cover something it might not have pursued on its own.
As the movie directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy finally says, the Globe itself had failed Boston because it had information about priestly abuses years before its investigation and never followed up. The church gravely erred, but that was just one demonstration of what happens when there are too many cozy chats, over drinks and dinner, among people who should be alert to what is happening around them.
Colette Jenkins can be reached at 330-996-3731 or cjenkins@thebeaconjournal.com. Rich Heldenfels can be reached at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.