more vast than they had at first believed

     I wrote here yesterday about the movie Spotlight, which is now on Netflix -- forgot to mention, it's a true story.  Like All The Presient's Men.

     I was thinking later after posting yesterday, people could assume the part about the newspaper reporters is fiction, with the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandal as the background -- like how Gone with the Wind is fiction, with the Civil War (real) as background.

     And so -- wanted to clarify:  the Boston Globe reporters you watch working, in the movie, are actors portraying real people:  Michael Rezendes; Robby Robinson; Sacha Pfeiffer; Marty Baron; Ben Bradlee Jr.; Matt Carroll.


     They were doing this work in the year 2001 -- there's a scene where the World Trade Center in New York City is burning, and a couple of the reporters are looking at it on a TV set, and they don't know what the deal is with that, yet....



     At the beginning of the movie, the scene is inside a police station where someone has made a complaint about a priest doing something to their child.  One policeman says to the other there had been a reporter there earlier, but he left.

     "But it'll be hard keepin' the press away from the arraignment."

-------------------- "Heh! -- what arraignment?"

     On the screen it says the year is 1976.


     In 1976 I was not living in Boston, but I was planning to go to B.U., and the next year I did.












     When I watched this film and they said the years when some of the incidents with priests happened -- I was living in the city then.  Not that this would affect me directly -- but it's just weird to think of.

     These things were not in the news back then -- not on the "radar."

     In the movie, they mention towns in Massachusetts which I have not thought of in a long time, but when I lived in Boston I'd hear those names -- Worcester (pronounced "Wooster"); Haverhill; Fall River.  ("Riv-ah")....




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------------------ [excerpt from the online magazine, WIRED] -------------------- The team has been working under the assumption that they're simply confirming a list of 20 or so priests in the Boston Archdiocese who have abused children.  

But the researcher, Richard Sipe, introduces the idea that there's enough abuse to hypothesize a "recognizable psychiatric phenomenon" within the subculture of Catholic priests, and they should be looking for a significantly higher number of possible abusers.

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Mind-boggling.

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