Spotlight (2015), The Keepers (2017)

Tom McCarthy's Spotlight and Ryan White's The Keepers are movies that complement each other:  the former is a drama about newspapermen and women in Boston who uncover pedophile Roman Catholic priests, while The Keepers is a documentary about the victims of pedophile priests in Baltimore and the possibility of a nun being murdered before she could report the abuse.  In the Boston case the victims were mostly male, in Baltimore mostly female and in both cities the Roman Catholic hierarchy covered up the abuse, often moving the priests to other parishes, where they usually continued to be predators. 

White talks with many of the Baltimore victims, who attended a girls' high school where they would be called into a priest's office and sexually molested.  The statute of limitations prevented this pedophile priest from being prosecuted, though there were some unsuccessful civil suits.  The victims in both cities knew little about sex and some were insecure and confused about their sexual identity.  The priests knew how to take advantage of their victims' weaknesses.

The question everyone asks is:  why didn't those who were abused tell anyone?  Because they were ashamed and made to think they themselves were at fault.  I grew up as a high church Episcopalian and was psychologically abused by our priest, especially when I was an altar boy.  When we knelt at the altar we had nothing to lean on to support ourselves and since we could not eat before communion one or more of us would have to leave in the middle of the service to vomit.  God was testing us, we were told.  In my working-class town the clergy was beyond reproach; though my father never went to church himself he insisted that his children do so.  When I asked why we had to go and he didn't he said "do as I say, not as I do," no irony intended.  My father actually said he would go to church if ,in one church bulletin given our at Sunday services there was no request for money.  I brought him several examples of bulletins with no requests for money but he just laughed at me.

The victims in  Boston and Baltimore and the many other cities where there is abuse are usually poor or working-class, from families who believed in the moral correctness of priests, teachers and law enforcement officers, all of whom were to be obeyed and never to be questioned. In the case of priests the celibacy requirement is a factor in the abuse:  in Spotlight a psychologist estimated that only 50% of priests were truly celibate and 6% of priests were pedophiles, an estimate that has turned out to be accurate in Boston and elsewhere. 

Spotlight is a good example of what I call the I.F. Stone approach to journalism:  thoroughly research the available records; in Boston, for instance, they tracked down information about priests not only from court records but from publications of the diocese itself, which listed transfers and medical leaves.  And in The Keepers Ryan White found everyone he could who was still alive and had been involved, or possibly involved, or knew anything about the case of the priest's abuse and the nun's murder.