When you come into this crazy world of ours, who are you supposed to trust?

Your parents for one. Your family members, aunts, uncles, siblings,

probably your teachers, doctors, and law enforcement.

And if you're one of the world's 1.36 billion Roman Catholics,

your local priest. For Catholics, your priest is supposed to provide you with spiritual guidance,

administering what Catholics call the sacraments. Special spiritual moments in a person's life

like baptism, confirmation, confessions, holy communion, marriage, and a couple more.

You're taught to trust them with your very salvation. They are your link to the divine.

But priests, it's supposed to engage with the community to bring everyone closer to God,

be a model of the spiritual ideal of Jesus. Someone compassionate, sacrificing their lives to serve

their communities, given to the poor in destitute, providing relief from the havoc in chaos.

The world can inflict upon you. In short, again, someone you can trust.

But for so many people in recent years, not counting the millions of Indigenous peoples

forced to convert when they were colonized and or brutally conquered over the past dozen

plus centuries, that trust has been broken in the worst of ways. Beginning in the 1980s,

the Catholic Church will begin to reckon with scandals of sexual abuse by priests that went

back decades, if not centuries, and millennia. First brought out to the National Spotlight,

here in the U.S. by Louisiana priest named Gilbert Gosh, who pled guilty to 11 counts of

molestation on 1985, accusations of priesthood sexual abuse, especially with minors,

would skyrocket in the following decades. This would lead to a series of explosive articles

published in 2002 by the Boston Globe, events that would later be made into the movie Spotlight.

Events that revealed not only were many priests being accused of sexual assaults,

...