The investigative journalism of Michael Rezendes
Embargo Date
2024-09-30
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
In 2002, the Spotlight investigative team of The Boston Globe published a two-part series—“Church allowed abuse by priests for years” and “Geoghan preferred preying on poorer children”—on the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sex abuse scandals within the Greater Boston area. The articles reported on the serial nature of John J. Geoghan’s thirty-year abuse of children in six different parishes and used Geoghan as an example of the widespread problem and growing knowledge of clergy sex abuse. The first article stated:
For decades, within the US Catholic Church, sexual misbehavior by priests was shrouded in secrecy - at every level. Abusive priests - Geoghan among them - often instructed traumatized youngers to say nothing about what had been done to them. Parents who learned of the abuse, often wracked by shame, guilt, and denial, tried to forget what the church had done. The few who complained were invariably urged to keep silent. And pastors and bishops, meanwhile, viewed the abuse as a sin for which priests could repent rather than as a compulsion they might be unable to control. (Spotlight, “Church allowed abuse by priests for years.” The Boston Globe (Boston), January 6, 2002).
That month, Judge Constance Sweeney unsealed court documents about Geoghan that provided evidence of the Church protecting the abusers, not the children. From the Spotlight articles, the dissertation moves to the Catholic Church’s response to these articles.
Michael Rezendes, a journalist then of The Boston Globe and now of The Associated Press, cooperated with other journalists and the editor of the Spotlight team. The career of Rezendes had been and was to be founded on a great interest in institutions that claim to promote every kind of well-being, but instead, protect damaging behaviors (and the knowledge of their existence) that break these promises and leave permanent consequences. Rezendes began his career as a journalist for and ultimately as the editor of the East Boston Community News. This was a critical stage toward the work that he later did on the Church scandal. At the Globe, he later returned to reporting without the help of team members when he wrote about the scandal of Bridgewater State Hospital.
The dissertation includes previously unpublished documents and materials relating to his journalism on the Church scandal, including meeting with Rezendes and having discussions with him, obtaining Cardinal Law’s handwritten copy of the speech that he gave in response to the 2002 Spotlight articles, interviewing Mitchell Garabedian, and providing an index of these articles.