Source: The Washington Post
By Bob Smietana
A veteran religion writer based in Nashville and the immediate past president of the Religion Newswriters Association.
Last night I sat on the couch, turned on a rented copy of “Spotlight” and thought of my Uncle Jimmy.
Wish he’d been there to watch with me.
We didn’t talk much about religion at family gatherings when I was growing up. But when we did, it was loud.
The debate I remember most: the one about the case of the Rev. James Porter.
Porter, who died in 2005, spent more than decade in jail for abusing dozens of children. He admitted abusing as many as 100 kids, most from the diocese of Fall River, about an hour south of Boston.
In the early 1990s, however, Porter’s case was dismissed as “aberrant,” as Cardinal Bernard Law told the Boston Globe in 1992.
Not long after news of Porter’s misdeeds broke in the early 1990s, I sat at the table in my grandmother’s house, listening to an angry debate over the story. My uncle claimed that all the accusations against Porter were exaggerations.
It’s all lies, my uncle told us. The bishop said so.
Some of my other relatives were skeptical. My uncle believed that the church would never lie to him. But his faith in the church and the bishop was betrayed.
That changed when the Globe’s Spotlight team began to investigate cases of abuse in Boston. They used all the tools of investigative journalism — court documents, interviews with victims, passionate appeals to sources, spreadsheets and even old church directories — to show that Law and other church leaders were lying. That abuse was all too common. And that church leaders covered it up.
Their reporting earned the Pulitzer Prize, and now, a best picture Oscar. It also, eventually, earned the respect of the Cardinal Sean O’Malley of the Archdiocese of Boston.
“By providing in-depth reporting on the history of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, the media led the Church to acknowledge the crimes and sins of its personnel and to begin to address its failings, the harm done to victims and their families and the needs of survivors, the cardinal told Boston Pilot, the archdiocese’s newspaper.