Another critical film, this one an Academy Award winner, was Spotlight, which recounted The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer winning reporting on the child sex abuse scandal in the Boston diocese.
The Daily Beastnoted, “Spotlight is about the Boston Globe’s series of investigative articles in 2002 that exposed the fact that there were hundreds of children who were sexually abused by Catholic priests who were moved from parish to parish, in addition to the church’s decades-long cover up of the many crimes.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt5L4Xc-HtY
Incredibly, this film was screened for the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, created by Pope Francis in 2014, which in practice consolidated Vatican policies covering up acts of pedophilia committed by prelates and lay brothers.
The Pope did not attend the screening, and the next day, Peter Saunders, one of two child sex abuse survivors on the Commission, was asked to take a leave of absence from the Commission.
The Vatican issued a statement saying that “It was decided,” that Saunders would take a leave of absence to “consider how he might best support the Commission’s work.”
Saunders held his own press conference and declared that he would not step down unless Pope Francis himself so directed.
An article in The Daily Beast explained that Saunders was frustrated by the slow pace of the Commission, and he committed the cardinal sin of telling the media that its work was “futile.” He said, “The last meeting in October was a non-event…I was told that Rome was not built in a day—but the problem is that it takes seconds to rape a child.”
Critics of the Vatican reinforced, “…the church hierarchy is an entitled, rigid, secretive, all-male monarchy. No new protocols or policies or procedures will radically undo a centuries-old self-serving structure that rewards clerics who keep a tight lid on child sex crimes and coverups.”
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