Hollywood’s movie Spotlight about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church that blew wide open in early 2002, thanks to the crack investigative reporting of the Boston Globe, is like the pot calling the kettle black. 

The institutional child abuse scandal in the entertainment industry – film, TV, and theater – dwarfs by orders of magnitude that in Catholic Church.

Even child actress Shirley Temple was sexually abused by producer Arthur Freed when she was 12, according to her 1988 autobiography, Child Star.  Mickey Rooney was the big box office attraction by then, and Freed had offered her a job at MGM after Fox terminated her contract.  Needless to say, she didn’t give a come-hither look when he dropped his drawers, and, well, her career didn’t fare too well after that in the sugary roles, two a year, in which she was cast.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. 

The main point in Spotlight is the institutional cover-up.  And that it was – sweeping under the carpet the fallout from the 1960s, when “Make Love Not War” and “Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll” were the mantras, with the Vietnam War, and sexual and pharmaceutical revolutions at fever pitch, leading pot-smoking, sex-crazed draft-dodgers, in relatively large numbers, to decide, by gum, they had a vocation to the priesthood.  Not so much.

But, what about the cover-up in Hollywood?

Just this year, An Open Secret, a documentary about child molestation in film, tallied the lowest box office numbers its distributors had seen in 26 years, which the producers attributed to the director’s unwillingness to get out there and promote it. 

That giant broom sound you hear is Hollywood sweeping its own institutional child abuse scandal under the carpet.

Needless to say, it’s not a proud moment for Hollywood, no more than it was for the Church when, on the front of the Boston Globe, story after story in 2002, 600 in all, told chilling details of abuse of children by sick priests and the institutional enablers.

But why can’t we be treated to films about all the good priests in the Catholic Church?  Even Spotlight could have featured more of them than the one who wrote a letter to Cardinal Bernard Francis Law challenging his immoral and/or wrongheaded policy of shuffling the sick priests around. 

Of course, Hollywood used to portray Catholic priests and laity in a positive light – San Francisco and Boys Town, both starring Spencer Tracy in 1936 and 1938, respectively, and three decades later A Man for All Seasons being salient examples.  So it’s not as if they can’t do it.  It’s just that Hollywood has become so much more liberal.  And less business-savvy.  In the 1940s, it’s not as if the moguls loved the Catholic Church.  What they loved was the money they made by portraying the Church in a favorable light.

There are so many good stories that would gross so much more money than the paltry $17 million Spotlight has grossed since its release in early November.  For instance, the priests I write about in Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends – including Fr. Peter Maguire, who “saved” Betty Hutton, and Fr. Padraic Loftus, who baptized Ann Miller, among others – would make great subjects for films.  Not to mention recently canonized Saints John Paul II the Great and John XXIII.

So much money to be made, and so little time.