(Left to right) Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton and Brian d’Arcy James star in the Oscar-nominated film “Spotlight,” based on a story with a real-life connection to Jackson. Photo courtesy Open Road Films
"Spotlight," the Oscar-nominated drama about the team of investigative journalists who broke the priest abuse for the Boston Globe, has an interesting Jackson connection. In the movie, the Boston Globe's new editor, Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber), meets with Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of Boston's powerful Roman Catholic church.
Law starts by telling Baron about his days as the editor of a Catholic newspaper, where he was also involved in civil-rights work alongside Medgar and Charles Evers. Before that, Law was ordained in Mississippi and led the Jackson diocese.
Law recalled those days in a 1989 Globe interview about conflict in Northern Ireland, saying: "I worked in Mississippi in the 1960s at a time of total segregation. Mississippi was even more polarized perhaps than Northern Ireland, but I saw Mississippi turn around." After Law resign from his Boston post in 2002, Pope John Paul II made him an archpriest in Rome, where Law retired in 2011.
See jfp.ms/allegedvictims to read about a local family whose three sons suffered priest abuse in Jackson during Cardinal Bernard Law's tenure here.
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