“Spotlight” is an Academy Award winning film that depicts the Boston Globe’s 2002 investigation of clerical sex abuse. It features stellar performances from Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Liev Schreiber. Keaton and Ruffalo, along with Rachel McAdams, portray members of the “Spotlight” team who do the Pulitzer-winning work. Based on stories by the journalists themselves, it has received over 100 awards and nominations. Vatican Radio praised it as “honest” and “compelling.” Chillingly, there are a couple Maine connections, including one with Cheverus high school in Portland.
A high point of the film is undoubtedly its treatment of the uniquely damaging quality of abuse under a religious authority. As one abuse survivor tells Spotlight, “When you’re a poor kid from a poor family… and when a priest pays attention to you, it’s a big deal. He asks you to collect the hymnals or take out the trash. It’s like God asking for help.” And when sexual advances begin, “How do you say no to God, right?” He points out that the abuse is not only physical but spiritual. “And when a priest does this to you, it robs you of your faith.” Later, one of the Spotlight team says she has stopped going to church with her nana. Another admits that although “lapsed” he had, until the investigation, held out on the possibility of returning someday. Later, he looks on as children sing “Silent Night” in a Christmas pageant. The children are the picture of innocence as they sing of the virgin and “holy infant so tender and mild.” It is a poignant moment. The institution that so elevated childhood and conceived of its purity is sullied with attacks on it. His disgust boils just below the surface.
Another important contribution is the sense of shared communal blame. The theme comes up in the important line, “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” Some are guilty; all are responsible. Eventually, this is even applied to Spotlight’s leader as he is asked, “Where were you? What took you so long?” and later asks the team “What about us?” It turns out that he had ignored information sent to him a decade prior. It is this sense that separates “Spotlight” from “All the President’s Men,” the classic film on Watergate to which it has been compared. That film is more a story of good guys going after bad guys. “Spotlight” aims to tell a different story, and mostly does.
This makes it all the more disappointing, however, when it fails to deliver. It often slips into treating church hierarchy as a mafia-type entity (“They control everything”), and all priest-abusers as of one type,:indiscriminate serial predators. To the movie’s credit, the word “pedophile” is used sparingly. The way the film unfolds, however, tends to keep up the pedophile-priest theme. The movie shifts from the particularly monstrous acts of Father Geoghan (GAY-gan), who serially abused over a hundred children, to dealing in numbers and listing cities. By the end, one could easily draw the conclusion that in hundreds of cities throughout the world there are a couple hundred Father Geoghans.
Truth is both an unconditional good and a precondition of freedom. True facts, however, can often be presented within untruthful contexts. The end of “Spotlight” does its subjects a disservice. We are presented with the numbers of articles and accusations, the resignation of Boston’s archbishop and a list of cities where clerical abuse scandals have since been uncovered. The facts, strung together as they are, imply that the Catholic Church has a peculiar level of sexual abuse and that it refuses to deal with the problem. Ignored are the higher levels of abuse within the general population and the failure of similar institutions to respond as the Church has and continues to do. What is needed is the demand that organizations dealing with children undertake as extensive auditing as the Catholic Church has. This means other churches, the U.S. public school system, residential home-care and social workers and scouting organizations. The press should continue to ask “What about us?” and undertake more extensive coverage of other institutions with comparable levels of abuse.
