Here is a scene that would have been difficult to imagine as little as one year ago: Five journalists from the Boston Globe sit on a stage before an audience of 600 Catholics, young, old, and middle-aged. These journalists—members of the paper’s investigative Spotlight Team—have produced hundreds of stories, week after week, month after month, that have damaged the Boston archdiocese like nothing in modern memory and that have created national and then international ripples. Evidence of sexual misconduct by priests, of heart-wrenching child abuse, and of a cover-up at the highest levels has been put in front of the public. And the reporters are treated almost as heroes, with several in the audience rising to thank them publicly for their coverage.

When BC’s Department of Communication sponsored the Globe panel, on a Wednesday night in late October, Robsham Theater was filled to capacity with journalism students and concerned Catholics from the wider community. As the Globe’s Walter V. Robinson recounted for the crowd, the Spotlight Team’s output had been prodigious: In the 10 months since breaking the initial story in January 2002, the newspaper had run about 600 articles relating to pedophile priests; its reporters had spoken to about 300 victims in the Boston archdiocese alone. The Globe staff had sifted through 10,000 pages of previously secret court documents. And the effects had been sweeping: Since February, 24 priests had been removed from Boston-area parishes, and 400 or so had been removed nationwide.

Robinson, who is the top editor for the Spotlight Team, began the discussion of how the Globe pursued the story, crediting the newspaper’s new editor, Martin Baron, with putting the project in motion. Baron, formerly the executive editor of the Miami Herald, became editor of the Globe in August 2001. The Globe had recently published a front-page story about Cardinal Bernard Law—“Law Defends His Response in Clergy Sex Abuse Case”—involving complaints against Fr. John Geoghan, an accused pedophile who was defrocked in 1998. Lawyers for Cardinal Law in civil suits filed by abuse victims had admitted that Law knew of Geoghan’s troubled history when he reassigned the priest to a new parish. Baron asked the Spotlight Team to look deeper into the story. In talking with attorneys involved in the suits, Robinson said, “What we had found out was that Geoghan appeared to be the tip of an iceberg of undetermined size—that over a period of time in recent years the archdiocese had secretly, without going near a courthouse door, settled some large number of cases involving a large number of priests. We did not know the number at that time. But [we learned] that these cases were settled primarily to keep the issue from becoming known to the public.”

Reporters Matt Carroll, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Stephen Kurkjian detailed the laborious efforts that brought the hidden history to light. Early on, Carroll set up a database, listing names (gathered from church yearbooks) of priests who had been reassigned or relieved of their duties through the 1980s and 1990s. The reporters knew that in some instances there had been allegations of sexual abuse. But when they searched court records, they came up with only the barest evidence—even when a case did exist, there was no information available about it. “After more reporting, we found out that these cases had been sealed by judges,” Carroll said. Shortly thereafter, Baron dispatched the paper’s lawyers to start the long process of getting access to the records.

Meanwhile, reporters began to discover that in back-and-forth motions between lawyers for the victims and the archdiocese, significant excerpts of the confidential records were attached as exhibits and had become part of the public record. As Michael Rezendes recounted, “Suddenly we realized that by piecing together these documents, we could show that we didn’t just have a story of a serial pedophile priest, which of course is terrible in and of itself, but we had a story unlike other stories about pedophile priests that showed that all the significant people who supervised this priest knew. That Cardinal Law knew and that his top bishops also knew.”

Those partial records gave the Spotlight Team the material for the initial stories in January about how the Church had handled the Geoghan case. “It’s almost impossible to explain the reaction we got,” said Pfeiffer. The telephone “rang constantly for weeks, and the huge majority of those calls were from victims, all over the country.” As Kurkjian recalled, “I’ve been a Globe reporter for 30 years and I’ve never seen a story take off like this one and cause fundamental changes in an institution.”

The sole moment of tension during the evening’s discussion in Robsham came when a gentleman who described himself as having “a 20-year history of defending the Catholic Church here in Massachusetts as a Catholic layman” sought to detail what he described as “a long, proven history at the Globe of an anti-Catholic rhetoric.”

As the man’s comments went on and some people shifted in their seats, the veteran reporter Kurkjian interrupted: “Do you have a question, sir?”

“The thing is,” the man said, “there’s no meddling with Jews and Protestants as of now; it would seem in fairness that you should check those institutions as well so that we can have a truly balanced report.”

Kurkjian replied: “That’s outrageous, sir. That’s outrageous. We have done that checking. The numbers aren’t there. Don’t ask us to balance the abuse that went on here by looking at other . . . .” The rest of his statement was drowned out by applause.

Globe reporter Matt Carroll took up the question. “It is true that the Globe has been accused of an anti-Catholic bias. As a matter of fact, when our first story came out on January 6, we were a little worried that there might be picketers out in front of the Globe.” But as events played out, the only place where picketers showed up was in front of the cardinal’s residence. Of the “thousands” of e-mails and phone calls the Globe has received since that day, Carroll said, “less than 1 percent” have been negative.

Pfeiffer described the paper’s adversarial relationship with the archdiocese: “This was a case where the institution we were writing about didn’t want us to write about what we were writing and wasn’t letting us in. The Church not only wouldn’t answer our questions, but wouldn’t take our questions. When we tried to submit questions, they didn’t want to look at them.” And Kurkjian acknowledged it is not easy to forget that when stories about the sexual assaults committed by ex-priest James R. Porter appeared in the Globe in 1992, Cardinal Law had famously declared, “By all means, we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe .” (Tellingly, Kurkjian remembered the quote as Law calling down “the wrath of God.”) Kurkjian recollected the moment he learned of Law’s comment: “I shrugged a little bit and said we’ll just have to put it in the paper and see what happens.”

After the program, a young-looking priest in Roman collar approached Walter Robinson. He thanked the journalist for his work but went on to ask Robinson to think about his “biases” when discussing such issues as the celibacy of priests. He took exception to an offhanded comment by Robinson that the Church scandal “brings into our sights the whole issue of celibacy and the role it plays.”

I later asked the priest to elaborate. He was Kevin R. White, SJ, a Boston College High School philosophy teacher who had, it turned out, written a defense of Catholic teaching on celibacy that had been published last March on the Globe’s op-ed page. His assessment of the Globe’s role in this story was mixed. “There’s both gratitude and a sense of frustration,” he said.

Fr. White said that many “nuances” of the unfolding story are not well covered by the reporters or the columnists at the Globe. “Celibacy is not understood by Globe reporters,” he said.

On the other hand, Fr. White believes the past year’s revelations will ultimately lead to “a stronger, more purified Church.” It is that sense of hope and faith that, if shared widely enough by Catholics, may eventually bring the day when the investigative reporters go on to other projects.

Dave Denison

Dave Denison is a freelance writer based in the Boston area.

Photo: Boston Globe reporters Walter Robinson (left), Matt Carroll, Michael Rezendes. By Lee Pellegrini

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