Earlier this month, I saw a trailer for the movie “Spotlight”, and from the gritty, fast moving cuts in the commercial, I knew it looked like my kind of movie. I mean, Michael Keaton. How can you not like a film with Michael Keaton? And Mark Ruffalo? After playing an Olympic wrestler in “Foxcatcher” and a recovering addict in “Thank You for Sharing”- and the Hulk in the Marvel Avengers series making massive bank? Those two guys are stellar actors, and the film looked good. What was not to like? Investigative journalism. Marquee actors. And a compelling story. I filed it away in my head to check it out at the time, and then forgot about it.

It was probably a week and a half ago that I happened upon Ruffalo in an interview on Stephen Colbert, and oh yeah, he was repping the film in his guest appearance. That film, I thought.

That film.

A film with an “All the President’s Men” sort of watershed inquiry into the Church.

The Catholic Church in Boston.

And, ultimately, the Catholic Church globally.

As our family activities on Thanksgiving Day wound down in the early evening, I made my customary trip to the theater to catch a good movie, and this time, it was that movie. “Spotlight”. A investigation thriller.

What began as a tight, building sort of caper in time morphed, for me, into a revelation.

The film wasn’t merely a film. It was a public service announcement, a dark reminder- or in my case, an eye-opener- about an ugly problem of great magnitude in the contemporary Catholic Church.

In the film, a key moment emerges when a former priest and a long time student of pedophilia in the priesthood (and largely disregarded, until 2001) theorized that as many as 6% of the priests serving in local congregations had this abusive. As the narrative in the story developed, we learn along with the investigative team of the Boston Globe, Spotlight, that the ignored expert and his theory turned out to be correct. In Boston, as in too many other locales around the world, the Church was not innocent of knowing about a systemic issue in which serial sex abusers were repeatedly removed, and instead of being removed from the field, were in time placed again in new pastoral positions.

6%.

When the film ended, on the day when the expose about the church went to press and Boston’s Cardinal Law was clearly identified as turning his head to these men and the horrible damage they did to the hearts and lives of a broad swath of young males in the district, we are not shown footage of aftermath. We do not hear the testimonies of men, once exploited adolescents, who tell about their experiences with one of the priests, and the abuse was cultivated and then perpetrated on them. We are not shown footage of masses of outraged locals filling courtrooms as justice is meted out on church representatives as public incredulity gives way to anger and rage. We aren’t shown graphs or charts of the progress of victims over time and metrics of the success of their recoveries, or of lawsuit payouts received due to the abuse practiced by these clergy.

We are left with none of that.

We are shown names of larger cities impacted by these findings, and given several large numbers, statistics of the count of priests who were identified as abusive in the Church at that time.

—

After watching the film, I drove home and just thought about it’s message for a while. And I was troubled.

The Church- in this case, the Catholic Church. So ancient, and so imbued with history, particular culture, traditions. Ignoring its own internal sins- and the spiritual and emotional depravity some of its own pushed upon those in their care.

Turning an eye from truth. From love. From Jesus and his teaching.

—

It happens. It is nothing new in this era, compared with the past, I presume. Our capacity as humans to turn ourselves from what we don’t want to see despite the consequences that that neglect will create is ever present. When the truth is unpleasant, how quickly we can ignore it- pretend it isn’t there.

M. Scott Peck pointed out in his book on evil, “The People of the Lie”, that one of the best places evil can be found is, unsurprisingly, the church because evil will always moonlight as good. Evil is a master of deception, and what more does it want to look like to deceive than that it wants to destroy. And evil is good at looking like the good, until those willing to look at hard an painful truths uncover it, and then face it. Despite the discomfort, the loss of prestige, the shame, and even the loss such an uncovering may bring. But the truth, Jesus said, will set you free.

Six percent.

A painful percentage indeed.