Brenda Buchanan

We’ve enjoyed several spectacular Sunday beach walks this month. It occurs to me on this last day of January that it’s time for a little show and tell. Compared to last year, the footing has been good, but the height of the tide always informs the walk, a truth borne out in spectacular fashion this week and last.

On Sunday, January 24, thanks to Winter Storm Jonas, much of the eastern seaboard was buried under a couple of feet of snow. Not a flake of snow had fallen in our part of Maine because Jonas blew out to sea before it reached us. The sun was shining and the roads were dry as we drove out the Black Point Road in Scarborough. The pathway that cuts through Massacre Pond was nicely packed and there was some wind, but the air wasn’t too nippy. We heard the surf long before we reached the little rise that leads to Scarborough Beach.

The surf was up at Scarborough Beach after Jonas shot past Maine, just far enough offshore to spare us the blizzard it brought to the rest of the Eastern Seaboard

If you haven’t seen Spotlight, you really must.

The recently-released film starring Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo is the based-on-fact story of how a team of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe peeled away decades of lies and denial to expose how the hierarchy of the Catholic Church covered up decades of sexual abuse inflicted upon children by parish priests. It is an important film, both for the story it tells and the way the story is told.

That question – you’re going to sue the church? – is uttered repeatedly in the first hour of the film. People inside and outside the newspaper were stunned by the notion that the Catholic Church could successfully be called to account in a court of law. At the outset, even those on the Globe’s vaunted Spotlight Team – a small group of investigative  reporters who’ve won accolades over the years for their hard-nosed journalism – were amazed enough to ask the question.

We’re going to sue the church?

In famously parochial Boston, the idea of petitioning a court to unseal records that the Catholic Church wished to keep private was unfathomable. The church wasn’t just plugged-in to the power structure, it was a load-bearing wall of the power-structure. Like certain banks and other financial institutions deemed too big to fail, the church seemed too big to sue. What petitioner would dare to try to expose not only the names of abusers, but the pattern of lies and favors and looks the other way that allowed the abuse and the cover-up to continue? What judge would ever grant such a motion?

You’re going to sue the church?
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