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Movie shines a 'Spotlight' on corruption

People have to be ready for the truth before it can be revealed.

That a theme of the riveting, award winning movie, Spotlight, which recounts how the Boston Globe newspaper laid bare an ecclesiastical and political coverup of rampant pedophilia by more than 87 Roman Catholic priests and brothers.

After years of Boston Globe staff ignoring clergy abuse cases, the newspaper investigative team, called Spotlight, broke its explosive story in 2002. It led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law and helped elevate clergy abuse into an international issue, which continues to reverberate.

The Canadian media, however, produced many stories about widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests and brothers much earlier than the Boston Globe. The spate of Canadian articles began in 1989 with Newfoundland Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal, first reported by The Sunday Express under publisher Michael Harris.

That was 12 years before the Boston expos Nevertheless, the historical timeline of 20th century Catholic abuse that is on the Spotlight film website contains no mention of the mass abuse of Mount Cashel orphans (which powerfully impacted two Metro Vancouver Catholic schools) or scores of other Canadian cases.

It appears most Canadians were ready, before most hermes birkin tote fake Americans, to admit to the horrible truth of Catholic clergy pedophilia. By the time the Boston expos was published, the Canadian media hermes birkin bag cheap had run thousands of articles about molesting clergy.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, under the direction of retired Vancouver archbishop Adam Exner, had also responded to the debacle as early as the mid 1990s by creating a complaints process that supported abuse victims in going to police.

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Almost every city has a powerful elite that operates behind the scenes to sway regional affairs. In Boston, it was the Catholic establishment, which did everything it could to keep a lid on decades of the clergy destructive behaviour.

At one point in Spotlight the Boston Globe publisher cautions his staff against running the clergy abuse investigation by warning that 53 per cent of the newspaper readers are Catholic.

Such pervasive resistance to the Catholic Church expos leads one of Spotlight investigative reporters (played by Mark Ruffalo) to finally burst: control everything! Everything! though the Canadian census says 43 hermes birkin blog fake per cent of Canadians have an affiliation with the Catholic Church, Canadian courts, governments and journalists have been less hesitant than most Americans to wade assertively into church sex abuse cases.

I wrote a story in 1993 that calculated the Canadian media had by then reported on more than 100 Canadian Catholic priests and brothers who had been charged or convicted of sex crimes.

It hard to know why Canadians were more ready to recognize the appalling truth.

Many brave people also deserve credit, especially the outspoken survivors of abuse. Bob Grinstead), some dogged journalists and some bold prosecutors and public officials, and in the end, some integrity filled Catholic leaders.

(It should not be overlooked that the Canadian public relative willingness to tackle child sex abuse soon extended to perpetrators in mainline Protestant and evangelical churches and New Age groups, not to mention to Boy Scout leaders, sports coaches and teachers in private and public schools.)

My unpleasant but necessary journalistic foray into the sometimes nasty world of sex abuse and coverup really began in 1989.

That was the year I travelled to Williams Lake for The Vancouver Sun hermès birkin bag cheap to cover the incendiary case against Father Harold McIntee, who was charged with abusing 17 boys while working at St. Joseph's residential school.

It was the same year the Mount Cashel outrage exploded, in the end involving 90 boys. I soon discovered six members of the Christian Brothers order who had been accused or convicted of crimes at Mount Cashel had been transferred to two Metro Vancouver Catholic schools; St. Thomas More Collegiate in Burnaby and Vancouver College. turned out to be a hotbed for Catholic clergy abuse.

With Catholics comprising roughly one in five British Columbians, the church hierarchy did not make reporters jobs easy. Pressure to back off came from church officials, Catholic lawyers and even journalists sympathetic to the church. At times I felt intimidated, albeit never threatened.

Things became especially tense in the late 1990s when lawyers for the victims at Mount Cashel sought compensation through the sale of St. Thomas More Collegiate and Vancouver College, which were also operated by the Christian Brothers.

I ended up in countless journalistic showdowns with Catholic officials, particularly the archdiocese media spokesman John Nixon (we continue to have a respectful relationship).

The Wall

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