“Spotlight” — is this what a liberal movie looks like? ###################################################### :date: 1970-01-01T00:00:00 :status: draft :category: faith :tags: cultureWar, Catholics, review, homosexuality So, we went to see the movie. After all, we were living in that time in Boston, our congregation (non-Catholic) bought its first church building from the Catholic church trying to collect money by selling empty church buildings, I am deeply interested in stories of hurt people, and yes, I hoped that with so many great actors, it will be a great movie. I was not disappointed, it is a great movie. I do not feel qualified to have much deep comments on the acting, so it seemed to me (as usual) almost perfect. Of course, every male is at least partially in love with awesome Rachel McAdams, so I really cannot comment on how perfect her acting was. Perhaps, the only small exception would be the person played by Mark Ruffalo. Is Michael Rezendes really such a nervous wreck with a tic, or was he bit overacting? I don’t know, but it was a bit distracting. Anyway, I really should not be allowed to comment on the artistic qualities of the movie, so I won’t. Obviously, even more important for this movie than movie-making technique is its message. So let me deal in this post just with one question put in as extreme tone as possible: is this a vicious anti-Catholic liberal [#]_ attack? First of all let make it clear that I do not think that being critical means to be an enemy. Even less, being a critical to the Church (or any parts of it) means that one is anti-Christian. I think Christians should be the first people to understand value of honesty, confession, of the Luther’s persuasion that “We are beggars”. I am Czech, I would consider myself reasonably patriotic, and yet I am a sharp critic (and lobbying for more admitting) of the `expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia`_. In all this I keep in front of me the person of Nehemiah, who in 1:7-11 of the book named after him prays to the Lord God: We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses. // Remember the word which You commanded Your servant Moses, saying, “If you are unfaithful I will scatter you among the peoples; // but if you return to Me and keep My commandments and do them, though those of you who have been scattered were in the most remote part of the heavens, I will gather them from there and will bring them to the place where I have chosen to cause My name to dwell.” // They are Your servants and Your people whom You redeemed by Your great power and by Your strong hand. // O Lord, I beseech You, may Your ear be attentive to the prayer of Your servant and the prayer of Your servants who delight to revere Your name, and make Your servant successful today and grant him compassion before this man. Nehemiah here confesses sins as one of the sinners (although, he probably did not commit all those sins himself), he clearly speaks in the name of whole his nation. So, yes, I believe it right for me to confess, that, we, Christians [#]_, and we, Czechs, did plenty of quite horrible things. The only way to the wholeness, health, and freedom is to admit our sins, to repent, and seek new fresh way towards the God, towards the Life, towards maturity. Also, when standing in the place of confessing sins, it is probably no good to start with `pointing to others`_ who are doing the same thing. So, yes, for the movie to be complete balanced sociological scientific paper on the abuse of minors, it should mention that there are many other institutions caring for minors who have problems with sexual abuse (Scouts, Protestant organizations). .. _`expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czechoslovakia .. _`pointing to others`: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes .. [#] Yes, I know that Americans are confused when using the word “liberal” while meaning what we Europeans would call Social Democrat or generally lefty. Yes, I would consider myself friend of liberalism in the tradition of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Edmund Burke, Frédéric Bastiat, or from more recent authors Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman, and I ask for forgiveness to all here mentioned (and my late father) for misusing the word, but we are talking here about the Boston of early 2000s, so I will follow their customs and talk about liberalism as the leading ideology of that time and that place. .. [#] This is certainly not the time to dwelt much on distinctions between denominations, so, as a Protestant, I do not think that I should complain too much, when accussed by unbelievers for sins of Inquisition. Yes, technically speaking, I have nothing to do with them, but if we take seriously our believe in one Body of Christ, we have to accept even the sins of our Catholic brethern. ---- * it is not anti-Catholic to be critical of the Catholic church * yet, it is strange, that for its alleged liberalism the movie has no consideration for the priests themselves (yes, there is that one priest who admits he was raped himself, but the movie never develops on it, and all Catholics priests are viewed only as enemies, devils without character) It was probably understandable for the original Spotlight team, because they have literally no access to any of the priests, and it was more important to report on the case, than to develop some deep understanding of psychology of abusing priests, but now? Fifteen years later? * It is not anti-Catholic, because “Wir sind Kirche” and the people who violated the Catholic Church in the movie (and in the reality) were exactly the pedophile Catholic priests and people who covered their tracts, even so many of them were big heads in the structure of the Catholic Church. All those parishes which were forced to be closed, all those people whose faith was questioned, and of course first of all those minors who were abused, are the Church and they were all brutally violated.