The Eye-Opening Film “spotlight”

Uncovering the sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church

Watching the film spotlight hurt my heart, when you think of church you think of a safe place to

go on a cold night, somewhere that will welcome you with loving arms, some people even think

of members of their church as family. I remember when I was hospitalized a priest from a

church, I used to go to came up to visit and bring me flowers. To think of church as anything but

that is hard. The movie spotlight and the events it is based off shows a very darker side to the

church and even how common it is within the church. After watching the movie, it led me to do

some own research as well and seeing how common it is, even around here in our own back

yard.

In 2001 a team of investigators set out to investigate one priest who was accused of molesting

more than 80 boys. Through investing this one case they found out he was just the tip of the ice

burg. They set out to find more priests who had done this, and their actions had been covered

up for. When the team was starting to realize how big the problem was going to be by talking to

victims, talking with lawyers, talking with people who had a specialization in this field they knew

they had to stay quiet until they got all the information they needed.

The investigations they did were so important because without them a lot of this wouldn’t be

known of. The investigative reporting team helped shinned light on this dark subject that even

people who used to work at the company had swept under the rug. Lawyers who had sent in

things years prior were now discouraged to talk to them because in order to create any change
they needed the media. One of the lawyers it took lots of time and energy to convince him to

be able to talk with even one of the victims because we were so afraid of the church, but the

reporters were able to make such a good connection with he ended up allowing him to do that

and with time gave the reporters everything they needed with a large amount of documents.

There were also several victims that they spoke to, some of them hardly wanted to talk at all

but were able to open to talk about it.

There was also a lot of networking within the community that happened even though it was Ina

big town of Boston, this was done with people at the church, events the investigative went to,

the therapist, lawyers they had met and I’m assuming worked on stuff with them before. There

are many other examples of networking in this film, but networking seems to be a huge part of

journalism, especially investigative journalism. Everyone knows sometimes. It could just be a

small piece of information one person knows to blow open an entire case. That is something I

find to be so awesome with journalism because you would get to truly know your community

and some many people and different aspect of life in it.