Vatican City, Feb 29, 2016 / 13:28 pm
The film Spotlight, which won the Oscar for best picture on Sunday, is a courageous movie that is not anti-Catholic, the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano said in two articles dedicated to comment on the Oscars.
Historian and journalist Lucetta Scaraffia, in an op-ed titled "It is not an anti-Catholic film," writes that Spotlight "is not anti-Catholic, as has been written, because it manages to voice the shock and profound pain of the faithful confronting the discovery of these horrendous realities."
The movie "does not delve into the long and tenacious battle that Joseph Ratzinger, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and as Pope, undertook against pedophilia in the Church," says Scaraffia, but "one film cannot tell all, and the difficulties that Ratzinger met with do not but confirm the film's theme, which is that too often ecclesiastical institutions have not known how to react with the necessary determination in the face of these crimes."
"Not all monsters wear cassocks. Pedophilia does not necessarily arise from the vow of chastity. However, it has become clear that in the Church some are more preoccupied with the image of the institution than of the seriousness of the act," the op-ed says.