Spotlight
starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Live Schrieber, John Slattery, Brian D’Arcy James and Stanley Tucci
written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy
directed by Tom McCarthy
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
Spotlight is a newspaper investigative drama set in The Boston Globe newspaper in 2000-2001. It features the paper’s uncovering of serial child sex abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese. The story exposes the collusion of Roman Catholic Archbishop (later Cardinal) Bernard Law. The film is very similar to All the President’s Men (1976, starring Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, directed by Alan J. Pakula), which featured The Washington Post’s exposure of the Watergate conspiracy. I mean it’s intense and suspenseful as we watch reporters slowly uncover and confirm a horrible story that we have since learned to be true.
Bernard Law became the first high-level Catholic Church official to be accused of actively participating in the cover-up of child molestation by predatory priests. The Church’s handling of the known problem - frequently moving priests to different parishes, settling cases out of court through arbitration that bound victims and their families with non-disclosure - looks like an ongoing, active business in child sexual exploitation. The way the arbitration system worked meant that the Church and its lawyers had a financial incentive to block cases from reaching open court. By merely transferring pedophile priests to new parishes they were enabling further abuse, turning it into a business. I hate how the scandal played/plays right into the hands of atheists’ anti-Church, anti-Christian rhetoric.
When the film starts a new editor of the daily Boston Globe newspaper Martin Baron (Liev Schrieber) sets the Spotlight investigatory team to work on the case in September 2001.
Bernard Law was quickly forced into retirement. He fled to Rome where he was elevated to the College of Cardinals. Despite having been directly responsible for moving pedophile priests from one parish to another in the Boston Archdiocese, rather than returning to the US and answering to the hundreds of victims, after his retirement in 2011, Law continued to live in Vatican City.
As of March 2013, Law was living at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. As of 2015, he was living in Palazzo della Cancelleria. Serial child abuse accomplice.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.