spotlight on sadness of the world

How appropriate that a gentle rain was falling as I exited the cinema.
It may not have masked my tears, but it gave me a gentler reason for having a wet face and streaming eyes.

This morning, for who knows what reason, I watched part of CBS This Morning. The weather segment was on and I heard that Mark Ruffalo would be on shortly to talk about his latest movie.
I stayed tuned in.
"Spotlight" was one of the night films at the recent Savannah Film Festival. I had missed it then and I missed it again on Sunday, when I had gone to the Wynnsong to see it.
(On that occasion, I had missed about fifteen minutes of it, so I went to "Brooklyn" instead, another SFF night film which had come to the multiplexes. As I told some friends, that film was not only a nice history piece, but it also dealt with nonracial bias, which was a refreshing change of pace. It seems that black and white are the only colors of the spectrum, especially these past eight years. people who were young, scared parents at the time of desegregation in the late 1960's are now great-grandparents, spreading that fear to yet another generation. Very sad state of affairs. Change takes so very long.)

As I was saying, I was watching for the interview with Mark Ruffalo. When he came on, he was with Mike Rezendes, the Boston Globe reporter he portrayed in the movie. [It should be noted that Rezendes still works for that newspaper. Amazing.)
After listening to their talk about the scientific process of reporting, I resolved to see the movie this afternoon. After all, I would be out and about southside anyway, collecting my students' Lab Final Exams and attending the talk and luncheon.
And so I did.

Heartbreaking.
I sat there and cried throughout most of the movie.
So very much sadness in the world, sliding off the screen and into my head.
Overwhelming.
The church had known all along.
So had the lawyers.
So had the police.
The Boston Globe had even known back in 1973 and wrote a short story about it. Then, no follow up occurred.
No one - no one - did anything to stop it for many years.
Five years before breaking the story, the Boston Globe had a victim's group bring a box full of evidence. The reporters wrote him off as a lunatic with an axe to grind.
Really.
It wasn't until a non-Catholic, non-Bostonian was put in charge at the newspaper that the story of priests abusing underprivileged children started gaining momentum.
All the time, the survivors spoke of the deceit of having a man of God betray them physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
All the time, everyone else spoke of how much the people of Boston needed the church, needed to have the church's reputation as a safe haven safeguarded.
Heartbreaking.
If not for Mitch Garabedian, a lawyer working to help several victims of abuse, the story might not have ever come together. He had told Rezendes that he was arranging to have fourteen files unsealed by the legal system that had hidden them for decades.
Then the carnage of September 11, 2001, distracted everyone's attention away from the scandal with the Catholic church.
Everyone's attention, that is, except Garabedian's. He had said he would hold off for six weeks - and then he made his move. The onus was then on the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe to rise to his charge and follow through with their reporting.
And they did.
But not before realizing that their leader had dropped the ball on the story back in 1973, when only 20 priests had been accused.
Now, in 2001, the count was up to 87 abusive men of the cloth, almost six percent of the number of Boston priests.
That was the same percentage a researcher had told them there would be, based on his three decades of study.
Heartbreaking.
At the end of the film, a list of other cities in which priests had sexually abused children appeared on the screen.
Savannah, GA.
Damn.
Heartbreaking.

While in Venice at a premiere of the film, Mark Ruffalo called on Pope Francis to please use the film to promote change. He said they all were “hoping that the pope and the Vatican use this very, very sober and judicious story to begin to heal the wounds that the church also received. [Spotlight is] a perfect opportunity to begin to right these wrongs, not just for the victims and their destroyed lives, but for all the people who’ve lost a way to order a chaotic world for themselves.”

Pope Francis, please do the right thing.
Please help all of the people involved, both the victims and the abusers, to find their way back to God, if not to the church.
Please.