I was pleasantly surprised when the 2016 Best Picture Oscar went to "Spotlight." As a veteran journalist, I thoroughly enjoyed the understated verisimilitude of the film. As a former movie critic, I admired the craftsmanship that went into its carefully constructed design and progression.
I likewise appreciated a particular comment from former Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, the real Mr. Baron, that is, who said before "Spotlight" was released that the newspaper’s Pulitzer-winning investigation of pedophilia among priests was built on the work of many earlier journalists around the country. With some ambivalence I here note that I was among those who broke a bit of original ground.
The pedophilia scandal came to light only over decades, in little pieces, with reporters on many newspapers in many states piecing it together fact by fact, advancing it a datum at a time.
In 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still president and home computers were still mostly unobtainable, I was assigned to a small, ad hoc team of investigative journalists at the Milwaukee Sentinel. Our team spent months looking into what was then the extremely cloistered and little understood circumstances of sexually active priests, many of whom were closeted gays. [NOTE: What follows are my own recollections; they do not necessarily reflect the views of my colleagues at the Milwaukee Sentinel, or those of anyone else.]
Starting from a single, intriguing tip, we spent months on a 10-part series, One issue was the psychological tension between a priest’s vow of celibacy, his expression of sexual urges, his desire for secrecy, and how all that might figure into alcoholism or other unhealthy behavior. Mindful of privacy, we exercised great caution approaching these individuals.
As our efforts became known, the newspaper had to fend off aggressive efforts by the church to slow or stop our work. And then there were challenges within our own organization. The paper's corporate attorneys were so worried about lawsuits that the editors decided we would publish no names of any clergy we wrote about, except for bishops, the archbishop or other church officials we would interview for comment.
In the course of our work we discovered, as did the Globe reporters some two decades later, situations where priests had been moved around from one diocese to another in unusual patterns. Although we had our theories as to what that meant, we could not tie those events to criminal incidents.
In Wisconsin and nationally, such linkages only emerged fully in the mid 1980s to mid '90s, in part thanks to further efforts by other reporters at both the Sentinel and the competing Milwaukee Journal (the papers later merged). Those reporters documented the shared concerns of Catholic school teachers and others.
One breakthrough came in late 1983, when the National Catholic Reporter published a sweeping article on the topic. Some of the Wisconsin clergymen we had tracked eventually were named in local news media in connection with alleged crimes, and court records became subjects of news stories by other reporters. The pedophile scandals eventually became headline news, with numerous priests in Wisconsin, Texas, Massachusetts and elsewhere facing criminal and civil actions.
By 2002 the Wisconsin scandal reached all the way up to the Milwaukee Archbishop, who resigned after it was disclosed the church privately had paid a $450,000 settlement to avoid a sexual assault claim against him by a former Marquette University theology student.
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe had begun publishing its lengthy series, singular in that, for the first time, the public was made aware of the tactical methods the church used to move problematic and law-breaking priests around from parish to parish (and even from country to country) in order to evade public embarrassment.
Before the Globe's series, the weekly Boston Phoenix newspaper paved ground with an eight-part 2001 series on sexually abusive priests and the church. That earlier series described how a priest who worked in the Archdiocese of Boston for more than 30 years was molesting children, and kept in parishes where he had daily contact with children.
Such preceding coverage -- a little of which also came from the Globe itself, as the film points out -- did not lessen the importance of the Spotlight investigation. It did, however, inform that inquiry, as did all the coverage in the preceding decades.
In reporting the 1979 Milwaukee Sentinel series, our scope of mission widened past the Catholic Church to encompass gay and other gender-identity clergy within other denominations. We outlined in our stories the scope of this phenomenon; did our readers know, for example, that the 8th and 15th centuries witnessed a series of openly gay popes?
We traveled to Minnesota to interview a married, bisexually active Protestant pastor. He had committed no crime as far as we could tell, but he had kept from his wife everything concerning his secret life, We respected his courage in agreeing to sit down with us.
Our main focus remained on closeted gays who were violating the Catholic Church's celibacy rule -- not on pedophiles, who did not emerge as an issue until very late in our reporting, when we began to find clues that a least one priest we'd identified through undercover contact seemed unusually libertine around juveniles in his official charge. We investigated further and did write about him, but with great caution.
Regarding priest pedophilia, the '70s were still mostly what Shakespeare called an undiscovered country. Few people really wanted to confront the uneasy implications of the handful of noticeable clues then laying about. The issue was spoken of entirely in small, private groups of mutual interest, including teachers and parents. For the most part, others along the periphery of such groups kept their heads down. Most of the nation remained blissfully unaware.
Near the end of our project, which is where the issue arose, we simply weren't able to pursue this startling angle to the necessary extent. We not only knew too little; it was too sensitive a subject for a self-regarded "family newspaper," especially given overall public sentiment and awareness.
Such anecdote was, at our paper, regarded as beyond the pale for most 1970s readers. That may sound strange, but America is at base a prudish land, and this was an era in which, for instance, coverage of well-documented murder cases often omitted gruesome details. Besides, our staff-strapped newspaper was impatient to print what we'd already uncovered and then move on. At least that's how I remember perceiving things as a reporter near his 30th birthday.
We were by the end of our assignment weary, frustrated and maybe even a bit overwhelmed. We were also discomfited that we couldn't run this other aspect of the story completely to ground or even write about everything we did know. Indeed, one of the series sidebars covered our own approach as journalists covering this issue, including our struggles to do it ethically and thoroughly yet within that era's idea of discretion and sensitivity. We nevertheless took hits from upset readers in the paper’s letters column.
I mentioned how the Sentinel did run our series but tamed it down. The epitome of that approach was represented in the headline over the Page One story that led off our series. The "hed," as it's spelled in journalism, was written (not, I assure you, by we reporters) so as to be anything but sensational, and not particularly journalistic. It read:
"Churches face major issue in 1980s"
Well, that was as clear as mud.
The series did manage to gain notice in one medium-length Associated Press wire dispatch, replicated in other newspapers, but soon after that fell into the memory hole. Of course, our pre-Internet series also came along far too soon to ever show up on the Web (although, as things turned out, you can if you look hard find it in the now-dormant Google newspaper archives).
I nevertheless think the series added to the collective consciousness. It left clues and leads -- little dangling participles of thought that cried out for further exploration. It covered real territory, but left an even greater pregnancy of what had not been published.
One way or another, further exploration of this social disgrace was inevitable. Good reporters simply can't resist a mystery or a hot story, no matter how hard it is to dig out.
We early shock troops who figuratively parachuted into this unknown country were struggling to push up a hill a stalled tank in low gear with its parking brake on, against roadblocks, enemy fire and rock slides. Still, you've got to start somewhere. Journalism, like the world itself, is constructed from pieces, one new byte of information at a time. It’s often painstaking, Sisyphean work that never seems to end.
That doesn't salve the terrible truth that so many more innocent children had to suffer in the intervening decades between 1979 and today. I do not sleep well when I think about that. Our Milwaukee Sentinel investigative team didn't to a fact know the full scope of what was going on back then, but it's fair to say we suspected more than we could write about or report, and were wide-eyed at the thought of what information we would have to leave out.
While I remain troubled by all this, I don't feel responsible. Too many important people in this country -- church officials, sympathetic prosecutors, police -- not only suspected what was going on, they in many cases knew all about it, enabled it and kept it hidden for years upon years. One of the great things about "Spotlight" is that it takes care to sketch out this code of silence.
Boston's Marty Baron said the work of his Spotlight team was built on the shoulders of many other journalists. I was one of those journalists and my shoulders are still a little sore. But that’s not a burden, it’s more like an honor. In any event, we were not heroes. We were professionals, struggling against big odds to do the best job we could.
We broke some ground, leaving clues and plenty of turf that later reporters would begin to dig into. They're still finding figurative caches and graves, and no doubt sometimes, like me, some of them are still finding it hard to sleep.