Movie Review: Spotlight

This movie attempts to give a history lesson about one of the most disturbing topics in human history. The massive child abuse of children at the hands of Catholic Priests. One of the most stunning statistics mentioned in this movie is that there is a 6% occurrence of Catholic Priests molesting children, mostly boys.  At this rate, this problem was explained in this movie as more of a psychological phenomenon isolated to the priesthood, rather than something that is a rare and sick occurrence from pedophiles in the Catholic Church who pray on young boys.   From the 1500 priests in the Boston area, it was determined that as many 90 priests had molested children, proving the 6% statistic to the letter.

This movie is mostly about the investigation of the child molestation crimes by Priests in Boston over a period of 25 years starting in the year 2001 when it is discovered that at first 13 priests were suspected of molesting children in their Parishes. Over the course of this movie it is discovered that lawyers and the Catholic Church were covering up this problem with payoffs, suppressing evidence and transferring Priests to different locations or having them take medical leave. Through the use of Catholic Church records the investigators who worked for the Boston Globe were able to discover 90 priests who molested boys and from them many hundreds of victims.  The staff of the Boston Globe was very well played by Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton,  Liev Schreiber and Mark Ruffalo .  One flaw in this movie is that the investigations and questioning can get a little tedious at times and this movie is probably too long at over 2 hours. At the end of this movie it is shown a list of cities in the world that have had a major scandal involving Catholic Priests and the list is very disturbingly long.One also has to wonder, based on the other statistic that 50% of all Catholic Priests are sexually active that if the Vatican would finally eliminate the vow of celibacy that perhaps this child abuse problem might be reduced if not eliminated altogether.

Overall, this is a good movie about a very difficult subject and is worth seeing.





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