‘It takes a village to abuse a child’

I always knew that watching Spotlight was going to be difficult for me, so I kept putting it off. Finally, with my wife out of town last week, I sprawled on the family-room floor with my two big dogs and steeled myself to view the Oscar-winning film about the investigation of sexual abuse in Boston’s Catholic Church. I was glad Patricia was away. I didn’t want her to see my tears.

As the next two hours crawled by, I was consumed by three emotions: admiration for the Boston Globe’s investigative team, pride in the journalism profession I have laboured in for more than four decades — and guilt.

One day in the 1970s, I fielded a phone call in the newsroom of the Providence Journal. The caller was a local woman with a story that seemed inconceivable: Her 10-year-old son had been repeatedly molested by a Roman Catholic priest.

A couple of days later, I sat across from her and her boy at their kitchen table in a rundown Providence tenement building. What they told me was chilling. The boy, his voice cracking, said that he wasn’t the only victim — two of his friends also had been abused. I asked the woman if she or the other parents had reported this to the Providence police. She said they’d tried, but the police scoffed and warned them that it was a crime to file a false report.

As a journalist, I am skeptical by nature. But by the time I left them that evening, I believed that what they’d told me was true. The next day, I consulted with an editor, one of the top guys who ran the paper. He branded their account rubbish before I could even finish relating it.

I understood why he was incredulous but insisted it was worth looking into. He forbade it. No way would the paper ever slander a priest, he said. Besides, he added, even if the story were true (a notion he dismissed out of hand), none of our readers would believe it. At the time, Rhode Island was the most heavily Roman Catholic state in the union, and people trusted the church — in the 1970s, public surveys regularly showed that more than 60 per cent of all Americans had high levels of confidence in organized religion.

I protested. The editor dug in. I argued. He got angry. If I didn’t let this go, he warned, I’d be looking for another line of work.  (more...)

‘It takes a village to abuse a child’: I got an early tip about a priest who molested children. And I sat on it