Catholic Priests: Is Spotlight Accurate?

we got to nail these scumbags we got to show people that nobody could get away with this not a priest or a cardinal or a freaking pope [Music] [Applause] [Music] ahoy mateys my name's father casey and i'm father patrick and this is a pawn fryer review yes it is father patrick it's wonderful to be with you today thank you i think this can be a tough episode i'll say it right now i think so too yes we are talking about the movie spotlight brilliant movie cinematically one best picture tells a very important story but a difficult one to watch uh it's about the clergy sex abuse crisis in the catholic church absolutely heartbreaking yes at be ready this is not an uplifting movie if you haven't seen it we'll say it is rated r we're not going to show necessarily the our parts but know that we are talking about some very heavy ass acts of abuse and that is um emotionally draining and something we'd say viewer discretion is advised not necessarily for the clips but our conversation yeah maybe watch this when your heart is open to the pain of life but if you're not really in that place right now skip this one until you're until you're there yeah we'll let you know we got a really good one coming next week very different tone but for now we take a sober moment to look and uh to be contrite and so we begin uh with uh with where we i think we should start which is the survivors we often talk about the church and defending the church or accusing the church whatever it might be but it has to be about the abused and so we're going to hear from one of the people who shares with the boston globe his experience breathe and i want you to know that you have the full cooperation of my organization snap how many members are in your organization phil we had 11 at our last chapter meeting uh no um 10 karen just moved you had a woman in your group of course it was a woman they don't discriminate now when it comes to abuse and this has nothing to do with being gay what this is is priests using the collar to rape kids kids boys and girls so right off the bat i think an important um maybe misconception people have a few one that it's about homosexuality the other is that girls weren't abused many many different types of people were abused it's about a sickness it's not necessarily about a disposition isn't it true that there's no correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia febriphilia uh there's definitely a connection maybe between homosexuality and the feedback so that would be post-pubescence so there are some connections there but under the age of 12 there's no connection at all yeah it's a commonly held belief that there's a connection but it's not true yeah and it's one things we've seen in the church as a response to this as um kind of homophobia and uh attacking gay people saying you caused the problem of the church and it's really not as he says it's abuse it's power i was 11 and i was prayed upon by father david hawley in worcester and i don't mean praying for i mean preyed upon when you're a poor kid from a poor family religion counts for a lot and when a priest pays attention to you it's a big deal you ask you to collect the hymnals or take out the trash you feel special it's like god asking for help so maybe it's a little weird when he tells you a dirty joke but now you got a secret together so you go along then he shows you a porno man and you go along and you go along and you go along until one day he asks you to jerk him off or give him a and so you go along with that too because you feel trapped because he has groomed you how do you say no to god right um yeah just thinking about kids in that position do we have to face reality i mean good night i know i mean it's something we talked about in my class we're talking about cults you know there's a connection here you've got a charismatic leader uh going on uh weak people necessarily uh people who are maybe vulnerable uh and you can see how it starts slow it's grooming them and i think one of those the saddest things we see in our world is that we blame victims how could you blame a ten-year-old for something like that yeah how nervy would it be to say you should have known yeah you know when they're just trying to trust and and and look up to good people you know that well i think one of the things that we often are looking to see this is physical abuse yes is physical abuse but it's spiritual abuse i mean the power dynamic here this isn't just an adult although the adult child dynamic is important it's a spiritual adult he's working for god and he says who could say no to god as a listener unfortunately to people who have been in these circumstances i find the most grievous thing i've heard people say is why me as if there was something about them that they became the target why why was it me what is it about me that made him come after me that's so hard to hear when i know they're wonderful and beautiful and good and it has nothing to do with them yeah but that's real that's real they they want to know why was it me yeah yeah and it's just that man because kids are trusting right kids are innocent and so when someone gives them attention especially if they're vulnerable especially if they come from a divided family or they come from a poor neighborhood they come from whatever it might be and they're looking for structure this is it's more than just abuse it's it's spiritual it's it's powerfully evil and when a priest does this to you he robs you of your faith so you reach for the bottle or the needle or if those don't work you jump off a bridge yeah it's not just some one-time thing i think when you think about a child experiencing this a lot of people have different experiences and some people can internalize and become healthy very quickly but a lot of people don't know what to do i mean it's a traumatic experience and so this can haunt people for the rest of their lives repeat sonia you know and he said drugs and alcohol and you find other destructive behavior anything to numb it get rid of it get out of it distract you from those distortions of your relationships with people so even if it's not just a priest just your friend talking with friends becomes different and i found that interesting it robs you of your faith i mean could there be a worse sin to commit i mean the lord spoke very grievously about anyone who should uh you know distract one of the little ones you should tie a giant millstone that's as big as this couch around your neck and be thrown into the sea yeah this is our hippie loving jesus that's pretty much what he said about people who do this yeah so obviously the big thrust of this movie is that the boston globe is trying to uncover this and so they're finding people who want us uh survivors who want to speak they're trying to find newspaper articles they're trying to go after the church to get the documents and they're having a lot of trouble because the church doesn't want people to know about it and it's not just the church though so he talks to a judge here and i find this troubling these exhibits you're after mr resendez they're very sensitive records well due respect your honor that's not the question the records are public maybe so but tell me where is the editorial responsibility in publishing records of this nature well where's the editorial responsibility in not publishing them there it is yeah it's the crux of the issue it's the truth yeah do we want people to hear the truth or do we want people to be comfortable in what they we think they should hear there are so many human examples of this hiding the truth thing you know your loved one gets a diagnosis that you're told but they're not told so you're not responsible for going in the room to tell them you have cancer or not to only have cancer you know you know them how they'll react what would be the best possible good but it literally boils down to forms of hiding and and not laying the truth out before somebody and to be an editor of a newspaper to decide what information yeah i mean i think there's responsibility here it's a tough thing and i i do think there are instances where you say and i say withhold the truth but there are certain things that certain people need to know at a certain time i don't know it sounds really bad but i think when you have something like this i think you have to have journalistic integrity to say i know people aren't going to like this and i know this is going to cause pain but the truth needs to come out yeah then there's forms of hiding too like dancing walking around eggshells around people in a home where someone has alcoholism or do i say this to them is they are they going to react well to it will it will it manifest good or not these are dicey difficult cloudy issues it's fascinating one of the big things in this movie is we see that it's not just the catholic church that's a major institution that is getting in the way of truth but we find that the police force doesn't want to report on it we find that the lawyers don't want to report on it we find that the the judges are getting in the way they try to interview people and they say oh i don't want to talk about that and so there's definitely a resistance to truth here that makes it very difficult the ymca doesn't want to be in the newspaper about it no one will come to the y anymore no the victim certainly didn't there's an interview at the beginning he said don't use my name i just have the little boy i don't want him to carry this around how are you going to find justice extremely difficult yes in the dark you need the light so they have some major breakthroughs they finally get the documents they get some letters some internal correspondence and it seems pretty damning um in the full sense of that word people doing really terrible things and so they find this letter here that um is interesting but i think it needs some context i understand his recent departure from saint brendan's may be related to this problem i wonder if father gagan should not be reduced to just weekend work while receiving some kind of therapy you know how grateful i am to you for your constant concern sincerely yours and our lord most reverend john m darcy auxiliary bishop of boston december 7 1984. an auxiliary bishop rosa that's incredible he broke ranks i mean when did gallant write her letter 1984. and law just ignored it how do you ignore that freaking letter and so we've got a letter someone knowing about it happening and saying well let's just have him do weekend miss let's get him therapy and this is one of the biggest accusations against the church is that we shuffle people around we cover people up we send them to therapy and then send them back wasn't there a period of time where even modern medical psychological therapeutic institutions believed it was healable and then they declared it no longer healable yes and that is the one bit of context i think this case always needs that doesn't get is through the 70s and 80s it was certainly the belief that therapy could get rid of this issue and people were thought to have been healed in fact the boston globe itself published an article in 1990 lauding this lauding the fact that it could be not necessarily cured but that people could be rehabilitated and even strange it sounds be among children again and so this is the boston globe itself as late as 1990 do you give an alcoholic a job at a bar do you give a pedophile a job at a school not now it just doesn't seem prudent even then uh yeah i mean that's that's the difference so it's hard to reconcile that behavior i think the bishops in the 70s would say hey the best psychologist in the world told me to do this so i did this and so that's that's part one right so we might be slightly exonerated for the first part the second part is yes once they've done it three times four times once the therapy is shown not to work maybe you say maybe this isn't the best recourse maybe we should be thinking a different and certainly after the mid 80s after the early 90s there's no excuse because no one is defending this so that's a little like someone abused someone at 60 and they move around a little different than someone abusing someone in the 90s how does that make you feel doesn't make me feel good either way i mean it's it's information and it's truth but it's not consoling it's not consoling at all no um it's understandable right so it gives it a context and says oh you're not an evil human being that does things to hurt people you may have been misinformed but it doesn't fix the situation there's also a psychological issue it seems to me of writing today's awareness on on history that doesn't seem fair you see that in the slavery issue and the confederacy issue and and in this issue as well oh sure sure we uh rightfully so have a sense of justice that we've learned today but that doesn't necessarily mean that people before us should be judged by what we've come to learn because they had to go through it in order for us to learn it so i do think that's important yeah i mean it's easy to cross your arms and put your hands on your hips and say they should have known and i have to they should have partially yeah i really think they should have known but because i do think that it was about money i don't think it was with the children's best intentions in mind i don't think it was with the church's best intention i mean as the people it was with the bottom line and there's a line in here where they recognized in the late 80s that it was a billion dollar liability and that's why they decided to to tamp it down law was actually one of the first people to investigate this but then abandoned it because he realized it was too dangerous that's that's pretty cruel when you know you're kind of the initiator and then step away and he got shipped off to a desk job in rome right yeah i mean we call it a promotion but i don't know if you can necessarily call it that there's no way yeah you can't read these letters to think anything else it's proof yeah it is this is good work should we take it up to ben uh no not yet why not we got law this is it no this is law covering for one priest there's another 90 out there yeah and we'll we'll print that story when we get it but we got to go with this now no i'm not going to rush the story mike we don't have a choice robbie if we don't rush to print somebody else is gonna find these letters and butcher the story joe quimby from the herald was at the freaking courthouse so we'll write a holding story and we'll keep our eye on the herald keep our eye on the herald they run this and they get it wrong the church will bury it we we gotta do this now mike mike what why why we're hesitating baron told us to get logged this is long baron told us to get the system we need the full scope that's the only thing that will put an end to this now let's take it up to ben let him decide we'll take it to ben when i say it's time it's time robbie it's time they knew and they let it happen two kids okay it could have been you it could have been me it could have been any of us we got to nail these scumbags we got to show people that nobody could get away with this not a priest or a cardinal or a freaking pope yeah i'm with him mm-hmm no one should get away with it i'm with him i also appreciate the editors uh perspective that let's do this right let's do it big let's get it done so it's done done yeah i mean the the writer is thinking well they could steal the story for us we got to get it right now and do it quickly and he's like no there's they're bigger fish to fry here it's not about cardinal law it's about the whole system yeah i don't appreciate the argument if we got to do it first at all in terms of competitive with the uh with the herald but uh his passion for kids and you know you have to ask yourself isn't it true that every day we don't do something another child is being groomed you know that's a possible yeah credible statement at this time in in our church history but i think if you i don't know if you don't go for the kill shot it will say you know you just kind of alert you you lose the element of surprise then then the church scrambles it covers things up even more it recluse it goes completely dark then maybe you don't get the full story yeah there's a whole line of corporate teaching about damage control you know and information sharing and usually those are aligned with profit profit making in this case it's aligned with uh just disturbing the sense of the church um there's some cultures that say this uh don't air your dirty laundry you know everybody's got it don't air your dirty laundry i think there's a little more than just my dirty laundry i mean i think i think this is an act of justice right absolutely like it's not just like um you know i've got these personal sins these are corporate sins the major structures that need to be fixed because that dirty laundry is going to make someone else's laundry smell like bad next door it's an ongoing issue and it's one thing i i think we miss and still miss in the church is it's a crime yeah it's not just a sin it's also a crime you've broken the law of the land and these laws come from the church many times and so we need to apply the law i don't know why people who are convicted of this aren't in jail so many of them still well they're not convicted in court that's the issue they're they're simply done by an internal investigation we find that it's credible and often one of the things they talk about in the movie is it's beyond the statute of limitations often the laws are written with only three years maybe five years and so when it comes 25 years later the court says i'm sorry there's nothing we can do so a lot of courts are now states are rewriting the laws to allow this to happen but i think the thing that we often forget about this is the vast majority of cases took place between 1960 and 1980 more or less 85 maybe the vast majority like 80 90 of our awareness of it came in 2002 and so it's not like we knew all this stuff in the 80s and then we could just try it i think we knew that something exists but because of the globe we found out oh oh we're talking about thousands here that were unreported that's i mean obviously people kept it secret they didn't want to know they didn't think they could get anything done and so it makes it very difficult now most of the time the priest who abused is already dead by the time the case comes forward and isn't it true that we didn't know but someone knew the officials knew someone knew i i still think i doubt anyone knew the extent of it i think people knew individual cases i knew things were going along but we like to keep things private in the church and so there's no way the diocese of boston knew what the diocese of indianapolis was doing i mean i think they probably saw it as isolated cases and we'll just keep it down and when you switch a bishop every five years i think there's not plausible deniability but there's certainly who could have known the vastness of this until someone broke the story this is where subsidiarity breaks everything down and that federation of the church really needs to be strong in an issue like this but you can you can identify with this i i hear his voice and his passion he can't get away with this something needs to be done not to deflect attention away from the church because i think the the movie very well points out the major sins that we've had and we've addressed them a little bit here i think what the movie also does well is recognize that it takes a few more than just the church to get this done this was a systematic problem not just our problem guys i'm really sorry i am i don't have any time to talk right now but if you call myself reason to believe that there are allegations against as many as 87 priests in boston i can't talk to you about that does that number sound right to you you got to be kidding me i just told you i don't have time for this crap right now how many priests did you settle robbie you know i can't tell you that you're going to give me the names and the names of their victims are you threatening me we've got two stories here we've got a story about degenerate clergy and we've got a story about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry bam yeah i mean again this is not to take attention away from us it's our crime but who's benefiting from it who knew about it and is continuing to allow it we mentioned the police not reporting it we know that lawyers were making a tremendous amount of money and still are making a lot of money off of this are there some ethical boundaries here to say do you kind of want this to continue so you can keep making money why didn't you come forward there's definitely some struggles here for us yeah and being a large church with significant assets in order we believe to conduct the mission of the church not to conduct cottage industry yeah crime that's a pretty deep pocket if you want to go after it yeah and uh i think you're exactly right there's a side of it that's the industry of legalism yep and it's one of the things why you hear most about the church is because we have the money and we're a corporate entity good luck trying to sue the public school system i don't think you can sue the public school system it's part of the government so there's no money to be had there we know that they shuffled people around just as much we know that instances of abuse were just as relevant there or prevalent there but the lawyers kind of followed where it could go and i'm not throwing lawyers completely under the bus here but there were certainly people who knew and made money off it and that should sicken us yeah it's it's bizarre because we focus so much on our own institutional sin and crimes to think that this is going on in every aspect of society yeah every institution you can think of the same rate of offense that's an interesting thing yeah yeah and then and then where's the cash if we're going to stop this let's let's make them hurt make who hurt well it's not going to hurt somebody who only has ten thousand dollars in the bank for their church or for their boy scout organization or whatever it might be but if you've got millions of dollars which you are purposely investing in order to use let's say the dividend for charitable efforts on an ongoing basis you can pull all that out of there yeah one of the things the movie points out is that about six percent of all priests worldwide had been engaged in some sort of abuse which is horrifying right six percent of 100 priests would be six of them the context that is that's consistent with humanity uh we find that in the public school system we found that among the boy scouts we find that among uncles uh we're actually just below six so we are slightly better woohoo for us no um it's it's terrible that we should have a higher standard right but i think the issue is that we're just as bad as everyone else but we've gotten a lot more press for it so that's it's a weird way of not defending us but just giving context that this is an issue that we don't want to just fix in our church we want to fix everywhere abuse of a child should never stand whether it's an uncle whether it's a teacher whether it's a coach and it happens so as i listen to you is six or seven percent the standard rate of offense across the human family that seems to be what research has shown yes so then the church is no different across the human family which is not the defense right that should be an accusation yeah no difference it ought to be different it should be um as we talked about the trust that we hold or used to uh we talk about the spiritual power we have we should more responsibility perhaps isolation in rectories or perhaps the uh the the the liberality of nearly absolute authority or the perspective of coming from god so you're you're coming from a pristine perspective but you're home alone a lot and the festering who's going to challenge you not too many people it's a it's a nasty like soup for yeah we talked about homosexuality not having a direct link i think the other side of it is people want to say celibacy being the cause of it we know that that's also not the case you just think logically every single person in the world is an abuser i mean that's just there's no link to that but i think what you're saying is touching on something very important which is clericalism which is a sense of isolation it's a sense of being above it's a sense of having complete control and then being a part of a system that will protect you it's that secrecy and clericalism that go hand in hand to maybe encourage people to join a life like this that maybe no one is maybe made into a pedophile but it maybe enables those who already have that tendency to get away with it and so there are definitely structures in the church that need to be changed is it homosexuality is it is it celibacy i don't think those are but clericalism yes i would say clericalism i being isolated from other people and the privilege just the pure privilege that people afford you yeah it's a nasty combo for this kind of thing but even it's interestingly even with those horrible situations that make for that soup the rate stayed the same it didn't increase it probably ought to increase with that protection and privilege well i suspect that six percent represents that time um it's very much low now i mean in terms of cases in terms of what we've done now to change the institution of the church it's remarkable since 2002 yes what we're up to now at least in one sense in the way that we are protecting children completely different fantastic in the way that we're bringing people to justice we're still lagging behind it took till 2015 13 years later to actually establish a tribunal it took 13 years to actually find up a structure to penalize people we're still dragging on that but catholic church is one of the safest places for a child today because we have to have background checks because we are never allowed to be alone because we have to go through every single year retraining everyone in the church has to be retrained to be on the property monthly video bulletins on how to detect grooming how to detect uh behaviors that are associated with this sort of thing zero tolerance policies we're so uber aware now if anyone has an accusation you are immediately removed from ministry until it can be cleared yeah we have friends who have been accused and some sometimes it finds its false occupation yes but other times it's either inconclusive or it's true there's nothing you do you must be removed yeah can can you imagine it's not innocent until proven guilty it's we don't know you did it we don't know you didn't but we're not taking a single chance yeah zero tolerance and so i think that leads us to our last clip here which is we've got our responsibility but i'd like to also challenge everyone else to take part in this responsibility as well it's one of the most powerful lines i think of the movie your new editor is a jew right oh that's right yeah well sleep he comes in and suddenly everybody's interested in the church you know why because it takes an outsider like me i'm armenian how many armenians do you know in boston steve kirchen works at the globe huh that's two you should get a prize or something what are you italian um portuguese from where oh east boston really east boston you don't sound like it the city these people making the rest of us feel like we don't belong but they know better than us look at how they treat their children mark my words mr resenders if it takes a village to raise a child it takes a village to abuse one whoa do you believe that yeah i think that's what was shown very well in this movie was it may not be the active abuse but there's complicit nation there's a complicit nature in knowing it not doing something or not asking the questions or not setting up parameters around i think an example would be i was at a church a couple years ago and we were playing basketball and there were kids there and a couple adults and all the adults started to leave and there was one kid left without a parent and the one adult was about to leave says hey father do you mind waiting for his dad i was like no absolutely not i have seen this movie i know you're not going to leave me in a church alone with this kid and he just never dawned on him he was trusting of me he liked me as a person he thought i was a good guy but no like you need to take responsibility otherwise bad things are going to happen to an institution that's got some problems yeah how how sad that the the hyperprotective uh awareness that we're now in is not shared completely by everyone yeah you know it's as if some people are caring for children and some people are not in order to care for them nowadays you have to be hyper vigilant of every circumstance around that child sharp objects electrical outlets and predators and i think it takes a village now to protect children and i think that's it's probably not the childhood you grew up with it wasn't the one i grew up with i mean we were pretty unprotected we could go where we wanted it was a safer world i think some just haven't caught up to the fact that we need to make sure that we know who this person is we know there are multiple adults there and we need to make sure that we collectively respond to this i can hear some people very angrily responding to what we've just said as don't put me in a mix with someone doing that i am not responsible for that i did not do that that's not part of my world and my sense of children my home is the safest place in the world for a child and yet they don't realize because maybe they're not trained or whatever it might be of the subtleties of uncle whoever or or you know the car ride the frequent car ride to the whatever um you know they're just not aware of it yeah i mean i grew up in the 90s when a lot of this was coming out i was what 12 13 years old when this came out i mean i'm not to blame for this right this is not on me but i joined this institution i decided to become a priest and support this thing and so i think all of us at home if you are a faithful catholic if you're a christian in general you are in some way complicit not to the things happening but you are responsible for making sure that it's a safe place for those who are here and if we refuse to ask questions or refuse to hold people accountable we just say oh that's someone else's problem i don't know what to say um we're complicit yeah it's so easy to dismiss language in a conversation that's flippant and casual that might have threatening connotations or invitatory converse connotations toward these sorts of behaviors and what i hear you saying father casey is hey look i'm now complicit i'm i'm a part of this organization and it won't happen on my watch i'm going to speak up i'm going to be aware trained and i'm going to defend children and want to back check people onto their heels who are exhibiting behaviors against what i've been trained how how rich for the church to have yeah that's our way forward this new life it really is i think we we haven't fully atoned for our sins i think there are still some that think oh why is this still keep coming up just ugh we dealt with that lightning we didn't did it yeah we didn't there's still people dealing with immense abuse i don't think that we've really brought justice as we said the tribunals are still not up in every every diocese there's still a lot of work to do and so if we want to get over this if we want a future for the church i think we still need to do a lot of healing of of the world of course but also of the structures that allow this to potentially still happen yeah i want everything transparent visible yeah yeah well any any other final remarks for this movie or this issue in general just that i sigh with the heaviest sigh over being a part of this sort of thing it's so strange for me because i came up in this very moment in these moments where it was at its peak and um you know what could i have done differently to try not to beat myself up on the head with it but but refashion my notion of a more safe future but i'm also i'm also worried that this is becoming a catholic thing i mean it's the butt of jokes comedians almost every night on tv it's a human thing and it's in each institution and i'm wondering if people really do care about kids if they're not calling it out everywhere instead of just you know well you don't want to put your child in the catholic church you know everywhere we go this same vigilance is absolutely necessary because the same rates of perpetration the same rates of offense the same rates of horrific lifetime coping necessities for people encounter this are existing in all the places we're going yeah it takes a village yeah not just one institution and so we've got a lot of work to do we thank people who are outside as he says an outsider it took someone outside to break this open and so we need outsiders we thank you for your objective stance and for calling us to task but we also need to call you to task to do that for everyone and not just us we need to be in this together to protect children everywhere we find them i have to tell you that i'm i'm so mixed on us doing this one i really didn't want to do this one because it just hurts personally so much but also you know our show is a is a we laugh a lot we have an interesting time he laughs this time but i want to thank you for putting in front of us all everything not just some things that will be mature and safer and and maybe use it as an esprit de corps for children and for the integrity of the church yeah truth can't contradict truth so we want to make sure that we're open to it all so tough stuff father patrick could you please close us in prayer in the name of the father the son and the holy spirit amen the paschal mystery lord you teach us is suffering death and new life uh i think the suffering is so clear to us lord bring us a death a death to the lack of safety in any any institution anywhere so that we might come to new life where children are revered and where illness and mental illness is treated in in the exact ways it needs to be treated from the latest technology and we ask your special grace upon our program that as we consider very difficult elements we might be pleasing the lord by the knowledge we gain to conduct new behaviors that please him we ask this in your holy name amen amen father the son and the holy spirit we thank you for joining us this week for a particularly heavy episode we promise you a great one next week it's going to be a little fun i cannot wait to see his reaction he's got nothing to prepare you're going to want to see this check us next week peace

Channel: Upon Friar Review

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Keywords: React, Catholic, Christian, priests, Franciscans, trending, popular, Church

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Length: 36min 15sec (2175 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021