Spotlight

The medium of film can treat organizational, societal, and global ethical problems either from one standpoint, which is appropriate if the assignment of blame for immoral conduct is clear (e.g., the Nazis), or by presenting both sides of an argument so to prompt the viewers to think about the ethically complex problem. This second approach is useful if it is not clear whether a character or a given conduct is unethical. When it is obvious which characters or actions are unethical, a film can still stimulate ethical reasoning and judgment by drawing attention to unethical systems as distinct from individuals and their respective conduct in the film. The film, Spotlight (2015), which is a true story, takes the position that Roman Catholic priests who molested and raped children in the Boston Archdiocese in Massachusetts behaved ethically. The dramatic tension in the film is set up when the chief editor of the Boston Globe, Liev Schreiber, tells the paper’s investigative “spotlight” managers that the story will not go to press until the system that enabled Cardinal Law and others to cover up many child-rapist priests by transferring them to other parishes is investigated. “We’re going after the system,” Liev says in keeping the story under wraps until the entire informal system that has enabled the rapists to continue to lead parishes.  

Harkening to the informal system extending beyond the Catholic Church to include Boston itself, Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer defends adults who have been abused by priests, says “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”  To the elite in Boston, the mantra is “Enjoy the party.” A village not only acts to protect its norms, whether ethical or unethical, but also to exclude people who are less interested in protecting unethical norms and ensuring conduct than in uncovering the truth. Walter (Robby) Robinson is not so subtly told he could find himself looking for a job in another city if he digs too deep. The systemic corruption in the film goes beyond Cardinal Law, and Liev resists the temptation to make the story solely or principally about the sordid Cardinal Law.

The Roman Catholic Church itself, including its officials in the Vatican, is portrayed in the film as grossly negligent and unethical for refusing to defrock pedophile priests. At the beginning of the film, a priest is whisked away in car so the matter can be handled “in house.” The lack of an institutional process by which the Church hierarchy is able to hold its occupants and the rank and file priests to account is a systemic corruption. So too, the clerical tradition of celibacy is portrayed in the film as toxic. A psychiatrist states that only 50% of Catholic priests are celibate. Six percent of all priests are raping kids. So he estimates that Robby’s investigation will uncover 90 priests. They are spotted because whereas typically priests are moved around every 10 to 12 years, the child-rapists are moved around every 2 or 3 years. Such movements stick out. That a psychiatrist is speaking is itself a hint that long-term celibacy in young and even middle-aged men is so unnatural that pathological outbursts from the repression of such an engrained instinct, which by the way is created by God, can be expected. The psychiatrist reports that the typical Catholic priest has “stunted psycho-sexual” development that is equivalent to that of a 12 year-old. Such stunting is very difficult to detect because it is kept behind the intentional distance between the clergy and the laity. The film could have included not only a psychiatrist, but also a theologian, who could be made to tell the journalists that a church tradition is hardly dogma, and thus can easily be changed. The theologian could ask rhetorically whether repressing a natural, God-given impulse that is so engrained in the human being and plays the important role of the propagation of the species can be sacrificed without violating God’s work as the Creator. In other words, turning human nature against itself can be reckoned as a sin.

Therefore, the systemic culpability goes beyond Fr. Talbott, who was at Boston College when he molested a hockey player and is mentioned in the film. An investigative journalist in the film is convinced that the president of the college must have known, and this implicates the system at that college. Similarly, a journalist says that Cardinal Law knew about Fr. Geogan, another pedophile priest. The Cardinal even ignored a letter. The Vatican’s system is implicated because, as the viewers of the film are informed just before the credits, the Cardinal resigned in shame in December, 2002 only to be reassigned by the Pope to the highest ranking Roman Catholic churches in the world, the Baslica si Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The viewers also learn that in 2002, the year after the initial investigation, the Spotlight investigation exposed 249 Roman Catholic priests and brothers in the Boston Archdiocese. As shown in the film, the Spotlight unit at the Boston Globe instituted a help-line for victims on the day that the story broke.

Therefore, rather than explore nuances pro and con on the ethics of priests molesting children and the Catholic hierarchy and even Catholics in Boston, the film argues that besides Cardinal Law and the 93 pedophile priests who had been molesting children, more than one system had been corrupted to the point that the rapists could be transferred every 2 or 3 years from parish to parish rather than defrocked and reported to local law enforcement.

Catholic viewers of the film could reasonably be expected to consider going over to the Episcopal, Lutheran, or Orthodox denominations—essentially voting against a corrupt ecclesiastical system with their feet. In the film, however, Richard, an adult Catholic who as a child was raped repeatedly by a priest, tells one or two of the “spotlight” journalists that he goes to Mass regularly because he “separates the eternal.” God is omnipresent, however, so the eternal is not in fact separate. Richard probably means that he separates his ethical judgment on the conduct of the priest and the Church’s hierarchy from his soul’s yearning for spiritual nourishment in the Mass. He could have cited the real, transubstantiated presence in the Eucharist of the Catholic Mass as being important in his sense of the divine presence in him in the taking of Communion. Historically, as a result of Donatist controversy, the liturgical validity and efficacy of a priest consecrating the Body and Blood of Christ is not negatively impacted by an unethical character or behavior.

Nevertheless, I don’t think any of the victims in the film who left the Catholic Church did so because they thought that the real presence of Christ in the Body and Bread was being compromised by the rapist priests. Rather, such victims would likely make the simple point that sexually molesting a child is not consistent with Christianity, so in protecting the culprits, the Roman Catholic Church had strayed from being Christian, particularly in terms of what Jesus preaches and exemplifies on love and compassion in the Gospels. Nothing quite offends people like hypocrisy, especially in the domain either of ethics or religion. Nothing in Christian theology justifies the unethical sexual molestation of children. It is not like the divine command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which is valid for Abraham even though in ethical terms to everyone else the act is one of unethical (attempted) murder.

The question may boil down to whether a Catholic should give up (or seek in another denomination of Christianity) ritual-conveyed real divine presence because of systemic violation, both in the Church hierarchy and by too many parish priests, of compassion and love that are valued, preached, and demonstrated by Jesus in the Gospels. Perhaps the underlying tension is between the claims that sanctification comes principally by regularly ingesting the Body and Blood of Christ in the Mass or by acting in compassion and love to meet the humane needs of even a person’s detractors and enemies. A Catholic can devoutly feel divine presence in the Eucharist and yet not act towards other people in compassion and love. To be sure, a ritualized sensitivity to the presence of divinity should go hand in hand with valuing and acting in compassion to others, but the linkage may be loose, such that to enter the Kingdom of God that Jesus says in the Gospels lies within a person may require standing up against a corrupt system that has played a role in rapes by priests. Put another way, the divine presence that is being compassionate even the worst of people may trump that which is felt in taking Communion if the two are in tension. To paraphrase Paul by drawing on 1 Corinthians 13:2, it can be affirmed that faith that the presence of divinity is felt inside in taking Communion may be so great as to move mountains, but if there is not love, “I am nothing.” The faith is for naught. 

So, without questioning the efficacy and validity of the consecration in the Mass by priests who, enabled by the Church hierarchy, have been or are materially injurious to the most vulnerable (i.e., children) by molesting them, it can also be affirmed not only that love and compassion are requisite to the kingdom of God being within a person, but also that people, and even their enabling religious organizations, who or that act antipodally to love and compassion are not in that kingdom. The Catholic Church’s mishandling of celibacy, pedophile priests, and the cover-ups brazenly committed by officials in the hierarchy demonstrate the need to place Jesus’ preaching and example of compassionate love in the Gospels above liturgical divine-presence when they conflict.