Spotlight: Systemic Evil

I was pleasantly surprised by the movie Spotlight : it was not unfair to the Church but did shed a helpful light on the priest sex scandal. The movie focuses on the investigative team (fine performances led by Michael Keaton)as they unravel the cover-up. Most are lapsed Catholics who carry no obvious animus against the Church although one editor is clearly troubled because of loyalty to the Church. The lead editor instigates the investigation: he is new to Boston, a Jew, and motivated by a professional interest in the truth. It seems that he would do the same for the NFL or the Boy Scouts or the NY Times. At a key point in the drama, the investigators are excited about evidence that "(Cardinal) Law knew!" The editor clarifies: it is not about Law. It is about whether there is a systemic cover-up! An even better clue comes later when key investigators are horrified at the lawyers who helped the Church with the cover-up. A lawyer answers that years earlier he had supplied that very newspaper with evidence about the priestly wrong-doing but that it had been buried by the Metropolitan section of the paper. Who was head of that section, we discover, but the lead investigator, the hero of the drama. In other words, it was not about the good guys (journalists) and the bad guys (clergy) but a deeper, pervasive pattern which recruited almost everyone: priests, laity, journalists, lawyers, and victims' families. It truly was a systemic pattern, largely invisible, unrecognized and not spoken about: it had the umbrella of normality over it. The sex abuse itself can be see in two parts: First the actual pedophilia abuse of children which involved serial behavior by a small group of very sick men; secondly, the broader pattern against adolescent males that was clearly a homosexual phenomena although (systemic) political correctness forbids that this be spoken. But the cover-up was even more disturbing for many of us. It seems to me that this cover-up was a perfect storm of group-think created by a convergence of forces: desire to protect the reputation of the Church (just like we would shield our own families), loyalty to fellow priests, naivete on the part of innocent clerics unfamiliar with sexual perversion, bad advice from psychologists (treatment will cure them!) and lawyers (avoid liability at all cost!), a clerical distance from and distrust of the lay victims, and even a deep shame-discomfort and avoidance of a disturbing matter. The concept of "systemic evil" is relatively new and falls outside our traditional understanding of actual sin as mortal and venial and is more closely related to original sin or the "sin of the world." The mimetic theory of Rene Girard can shed light: in various ways, conscious and unconscious, we imitate or mirror the behavior of others. It is our very nature to do so. Often we are hardly aware of it. Some patterns that constitute our world include: collaboration with the abortion industry by voting compulsively for pro-abortion democrats; the contraceptive mentality that is not mentioned, cannot be challenged and is now invincibly institutionalized by Obamacare; the politically correct deconstruction of gender that leaves young men adrift without markers on the road to manly fidelity and integrity; an overarching technology and bureaucracy (both governmental and corporate) that violates subsidiarity and leaves us, personally and communally, paralyzed and impotent; a class system (NOT racism, which has not been a systemic evil for half a century) that is getting worse; and a meritocracy which rewards self-centered advancement at the expense of solidarity. The scary thing is that these dynamics are working on us relentlessly and we barely are aware!