Spotlight - Old sins cast long shadows

Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep till noon. This quip from Mark Twain strikes at a very real weakness in human nature – that of judging people by their reputations rather than their actions. One can extrapolate this pithy truth and paraphrase it to suit many a situation. ‘Give a man the title of ‘reverend’ and he can get away with anything’ is particularly pertinent in this case.

The respect and deference given to a group of men paid to professionally believe in things for which there isn’t any evidence is astounding enough, but then there is also the celibacy, the nuns, the incantations, the literal transmogrification of unleavened bread into flesh and wine into blood…all this so that we the sinful may know how to be good. Extra ecclisiam nulla salus, proclaims the Roman Catholic Church - Outside the church there is no salvation. But what is inside the church? Unsurprisingly, far from being the prelapsarian purity purported by propaganda, the particularly stultifying and atavistic mixture of celibacy, sadomasochistic teachings of morality, illogical rituals, obscurantist theology and suppressed urges boil up in a bitter cud of twisted minds. For a morally average person, in their average moral landscape of virtues and vices, I predict that there are very few gorges that can sink as low as the wilful physical and sexual abuse of innocent children. But this is the one crime repeatedly and flagrantly perpetuated by scores of men of the cloths. You may say that this is the case of a few bad apples and that, despite all the holiness and refulgence supposedly gushing out of the church, the amount of apostolic pederasty is no higher than in any other earthly corporations. But what separates the story of child-rape done by members of the church and escalates it to the level of evilness is the fact that this holy establishment systematically and purposefully covered up these crimes with money, threats and emotional blackmail. As if that’s not enough, it moved offending paedophiles to other unsuspecting parishes, free to prey on more children.

It is the simultaneously exhilarating and nauseating process of uncovering of this fact in Boston that the film Spotlight focuses its unrelenting gaze. Spotlight is the longest running investigative journalist team in the US. For their work in uncovering the systematic covering-up of over 80 known child-molesting priests in the Boston area, the team was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. The Oscar-winning film was impeccably directed by Tom McCarthy (nominated for best director), and the stellar cast, aided by a tightly written script (by McCarthy and Josh Singer) and a soberingly recent and ongoing story, gives a suppressed but very nuanced performance that succeeds in making what essentially is a film about people sitting at desks and talking intensely captivating and thrilling.

The real Spotlight team with some of the film's cast

What struck me most from the film is the fortuitous way in which the thread that unravelling the nest of vipers was plucked. In the tight-knit, village-like city of Boston, a new editor, an unmarried, baseball-hating, non-Bostonian Jew (a complete outsider in other words) named Marty Baron, played with interesting and affecting diffident reticence by Liev Schreiber, reads a small and forgotten column in the Boston Globe about a lawyer claiming that Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of Boston, knew about the child-molesting priest John Geoghan’s actions and not only did nothing but shuffled him around to other parishes when trouble began to brew. He pushes the Spotlight team, who hesitates briefly to ruffle the church’s feathers, to investigate this issue on what appears to be rather nebulous leads. But as they begin peeling away layer and layer of lies and trace the scarlet thread of pain and deceit, paying along the way with their own personal emotional sufferings, the small group of journalists find themselves standing vertiginously on the edge of the precipice, gazing down the abyss of unbelievable evil.

In a pertinent moment of the film, which I think is the moment of anagnorisis among many epiphanous moments, the journalist Michael Rezendes, played with great gusto by Mark Ruffalo, was talking to the lawyer Mitchell Garabedian, whom Stanley Tucci played with a wonderful mixture of irksome weariness, which his characters usually possess, but also with the addition of an acumen and gravity which I’m not sure how he generated. Garabeidan has spent his career, at great personal cost, fighting a David versus Goliath battle against the church on the matter of child rape. He makes an observation to Rezendes – he points out that Marty Baron, who pushed for this investigation to go all the way, is a Jew while he himself is an Armenian. In an insular society that promotes and even demands insider conformity, it takes an outsider, especially outsiders who carry with them the burdens of their ancestors’ unspeakable histories of sufferings, to be the ones who point out that the emperor wears no clothes. On the flip side, the psychology of the insiders were amply explored with a scene where the head of the Spotlight team, Walter Robinson (played with great depths by Michael Keaton), a life-long Boston native and popular figure, was talking to those who want him to stop the investigation and sullying of the church’s reputation. He points out to one of them, a fellow student at his old high school, where a paedophile priest once worked, that the reason why they weren’t abused could just be that they didn’t play hockey. The priest coached the hockey team and victimised many boys on the team across the years. Mutate nomine, et de te fabula naratur.

Garabedian

Among many things such as the naked arrogance and icily-cold indifference of the church to its thousands of children-victims, the film highlights the incredible absence of disconformity in a culture marinated with orthodoxy and respect for the clergy that allowed such evil to go brazenly on for so long. Dahlia Lithwick reported in Slate in December 19^th 2002 that

[t]he evidence speaks for itself: Last spring, Law admitted in a deposition that he was aware that John Geoghan had reportedly raped at least seven young boys in 1984 yet nevertheless approved the transfer of Geoghan to another parish, working with other boys. Other documents revealed that Law similarly knew of and ignored decades of reported child abuse by Paul Shanley, placing Shanley in ministries with access to other children. Shanley is currently facing trial on 10 charges of child rape and six counts of indecent assault and battery. 

So what happened to Cardinal Law? After he (and his predecessor Cardinal Medeiros) were fully exposed and had little choice but to resign, the man who covered up sex abuses and moved paedophiles around to unsuspecting parishes to abuse more children fled to Rome at the end of 2002, moments before state troopers with subpoenas came knocking to seek his grand jury testimony. In the eternal city, not only was he not chastised (a suitable time to bring back the auto-da-fé perhaps), he was given by John Paul II the cushy sinecure at the world-famous Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Furthermore, he even had the privilege to participate in the 2005 Papal conclave that placed Herr Joseph Ratzinger on the papal throne. He now lives in the grand renaissance palace designed by Bramante, Palazzo della Cancelleria, a world heritage building. This should make you wish you had a bigger spleen to explode with the appropriate amount of splenic juices of outrage. That the widely respected John Paul II should be complicit in the story goes to show the depth of corruption, which will be expanded upon. As Christopher Hitchens wrote with his devastating vehemence, that among all the spoiled priests,

Cardinal Bernard Law somehow manages to stand out. Of all the offenses that are most vile and unpardonable, the crime of child rape distinguishes itself without further elaboration. And this ugly prince of the church scuttles and shuffles off to Rome to beg permission to make light of it. The documents clearly show him complicit with violations of which a decent person cannot even be suspected. And yet, for these many months, he has acted as if he were himself the persecuted victim. He has also brought bitter shame upon his congregation by seeming to act as if the advice of a foreign politician - the barely sentient pope - was more important than a moral law that anyone can understand without being taught it in catechism.

It must be mentioned however that many priests were equally outraged by the depth and scope of this systematic protection and abetting of paedophiles. Law's resignation was partly driven by a letter from scores of priests demanding him to step down as the head of the archdiocese of Boston. A key catalyst and critical source of information to the Spotlight team was Richard Sipe, a man who spent decades studying the phenomenon of paedophilia in the clergy and who was himself a Benedictine monk for 18 years. Sipe is pleasingly married a lapsed nun. Despite multiple attempts from the church to discredit him, Sipe testified in more than 50 law suits on behalf of victims of childhood sex abuse by priests. As the old saying goes, the fish rots from the head. All the evidence goes to show that the head of the largest church in the world has long decomposed in the insular and dogmatic splendour of the Vatican.

While the film does a fantastic job in portraying the story of the battle of the Spotlight in uncovering scores of priests and a history in Boston that goes back decades of systematically covering up child molestation by the church, the odious behaviour is far more spread and harrowing than even the film’s sobering end credits suggest. In Alex Gibney’s award winning film Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, the history of these cover ups is dissected with scalpel-like scrutiny, beginning with the story of father Lawrence Murphy, who abused more than 200 deaf and dumb children in the 1960’s and 70’s and all the way up to the arrogant abuse of power by the Vatican as a new wave of global exposures erupted throughout the 2000’s.

Keaton and McAdams as Robinson and Pfeiffer

It is perhaps unknown to many that Ratzinger, for 25 years before popedom, was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the rebranded office that once called itself The Inquisition when it was funded in the 16^th century. In 2001 documents show that Ratzinger, with the approval of John Paul II, demanded that all cases regarding child sex abuse to go to his desk. It is also documented that in the decade from 2001 to 2010 the Holy See considered sex abuse allegations concerning about 3,000 priests dating back half a century. The John Jay Report, funded by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, reported in 2004 on 10,667 alleged victims against 4,392 priests accused of sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002. Their report reveal that only a quarter of allegations were made within 10 years of the incident with an astounding 25% being reported more than 30 years after the crime. Indeed Cardinal Pell of Australia is now in hiding at the Vatican while answering with haughty indifference questions posed to him by the Royal Commission about his knowledge of child-raping priests that he too moved around to different parishes decades ago. One wonders if there is a manual going around the Vatican titled ‘Manual on How to Deal with Paedophile Priests’. As Hitchens reported, with the mountain of data outlining the horrendous crimes committed by his fellow priests on innocent children, some as young as 3, from all over the globe, Ratzinger, the future pope,

issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! ... The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice

In a moving scene of the film, we watch Rachel McAdams’s character, the Spotlight journalist Sacha Pfeiffer watch as his devout Catholic grandmother reads the article they published and writhes internally as the old woman is overcome with emotion while faced with the facts. Uncomfortable as the whole saga is, as John Adams once remarked, facts are stubborn things. But facts must be faced and truth and justice, the most important aspects of moral ethics, should be upheld in preference to any hurt feelings, soiled reputations or general uncomfortableness. The criminal responsibilities of the church has not nearly been satisfied and their conduct is still shrouded in self-serving mystery. Far from being the distributor of truth and ethics, the church has shown again and again over centuries that they fail to catch up to the ethics and moral instincts of even the most average persons. As Lucretius wrote in his De Rerum Natura: 'Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum'. To such heights of evil are men driven by religion. 

Cardinal Newman wrote in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua:

The Catholic Church holds it better for the Sun and Moon to drop from Heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die from starvation in extremest agony … than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.

Beautifully phrased and couched in noble intent as it is, the sentiment of the famous exegesis on Church ethics is the distillation of the arrogance and callousness of the church in picturing people, individuals, as undistinguished raw material and the profession of a fanatical fantasy of purity. The most alarming thing is the thought that many of these men are unaware that what they are doing is evil. They may even think that in protecting the reputation of the church, they are doing good. It has been made dreadfully clear that the one instinct of the church when faced with the heinousness of its own crimes and the outcries of its victims, is to do all it can to protect its own reputation while unfeelingly leaving its victims, its own parishioners in the gutter. I think it is fair to say that the billions of Catholics around the world deserve a better church. 

For such a charged and stultified topic cocooned by shame, pain, fear and disgust, one can hope that excellent films such as Spotlight, with its well-deserved accolades, will disperse the stigma and give a measure of catharsis and confidence to the victims, bring some shame to those perpetrating or helping to deny justice and to rehash to society that the hideous crime of child rape, no mattered committed by whom, will be broadcast to the light of day and brought to feel the full force of secular law.