A well-funded organization with a carefully groomed philanthropic public image and hundreds of millions of dollars (some of it U.S. federal funding or contracts) turns out to be allowing the systematic abuse of children on its watch — in fact to be bending all its efforts not to stopping such abuse, but to covering it up from peering eyes, and saving the culprits from prosecution. Intrepid, tireless journalists get wind of this abuse, and through dogged efforts expose the abusers and their enablers. No one goes to jail, but the organization is gravely discredited in the minds of those willing to face the facts.

Which did I just describe — the Catholic church in America, or Planned Parenthood? The answer, sadly, is both.

Last night I had a searing experience, which every Catholic should share: I went to see the powerfully written, beautifully acted movie Spotlight, starring Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo and Stanley Tucci. The film has been highly praised, and nominated for many Academy Awards, including Best Picture — deservedly so. There wasn’t an exploitative or manipulative moment in it. Instead, it showed with sober storytelling how honest, old-fashioned journalism at its best can be the servant of truth, the common good and the innocence of children. The “Spotlight” reporter team at the Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for the more than 200 stories they published exposing hundreds of predator priests and thousands of conspiratorial acts by the Boston Archdiocese to cover their crimes. I think they deserved a papal medal, too, for their service to the church.

The film depicts the appalling impact of child sexual abuse among certain priests, and the infinitely more disturbing reaction of senior clergy — not just in Boston, but all across the country. As the Dallas Morning News documented in 2002, in the wake of the stories broken by the Boston Globe, which exposed the extent of sex abuse and clerical cover-ups, two bishops out of three in the United States had covered up such abuse. They had shuffled predator priests from parish to parish, sent them for useless New Age “counseling,” used legal threats and bribes to silence victims, and pulled political strings to discourage cops and prosecutors from sending these perverts to prison.

In the light of such exposure, in 2002 the U.S. bishops did impose a draconian policy of “one strike and you’re out” on the priests who serve under them: a single credible accusation should now get priests removed from service, and reported to police.

What the bishops didn’t do is create a policy for punishing their own. There is still no mechanism for removing a bishop from office who acts like Boston’s Bernard Law or Los Angeles’ Roger Mahony, leaders who acted with callous disregard for the safety of innocent children, but doting concern for church insurance premiums and their own political influence. Fourteen long years later.

As I saw first-hand, people who cover up for sexual criminals can enjoy long and comfortable careers, amid circles of well-meaning pious folk who want to believe the best of them. For my part, I have zero interest in the statements of the U.S. bishops conference on immigration, gun control, the economy or any other subject until they display the minimal integrity to police their own ranks on this basic moral issue.

In the meantime, it’s good that the Boston Globe, and now Hollywood, stepped up to do some of that policing for them, providing a crucial watchdog service for many children across America. Would that Hollywood and the mainstream media provided a similar watchdog service for the unborn children of America.

A Spotlight on Planned Parenthood

What I’m waiting for now is the high-budget, A-list Hollywood film depicting Planned Parenthood’s systematic abuse of children: the more than 300,000 abortions it performs every year; its illegal profiteering in the stolen parts of butchered babies; the shoddy and inadequate health care it uses as a fig leaf for its abortion business; the half-billion dollars it gets from the U.S. taxpayer each year despite the pro-life Hatch Amendment; its vast network of political donations to abortion boosters like Hillary Clinton; and for good measure, Planned Parenthood’s origin as a white racist eugenics organization aimed at (in founder Margaret Sanger’s own words) arranging for more children “from the fit, and fewer from the unfit.”

That is a movie I’d go to see. Because I have seen the raw reporting on which it would be based: the dozen videos created by the dogged journalists at the Center for Medical Progress — videos which Democratic legislators and staffers refused to watch when they were shown on Capitol Hill, which biased judges have tried to ban, and which finally might land their makers not a Pulitzer Prize, but a 20-year term in prison.

Of course, we shouldn’t hold our breath. If the Catholic church held some sway in Boston in 2001, it was easily enough overcome when reporters insisted on doing their jobs — which shamed police, prosecutors, even bishops into finally doing theirs. None of the Boston Globe reporters faced death threats or even harassment, much less imprisonment. (Their pious grandmas frowned at them. They lost a few friends.) But the financial, political, and cultural power of organizations like Planned Parenthood is far more entrenched in our popular and mainstream media culture. It taps not into the virtues we wish we were practicing, but into the vices to which we’re addicted.

As Joe Sobran once wrote, explaining why the Playboy Foundation spent so much money making and keeping abortion legal: To a certain kind of man, a pregnant woman is a broken toy, and the abortionist is the toymaker who “fixes” her. Much of the Hollywood world is deeply invested in the utopian, hedonist dream that goaded Margaret Sanger to her frenzied activism. The culture of death is a theocracy, and abortion is its sacrament.

The Catholic Battle Against Eugenics

If it ever got made, the Planned Parenthood version of Spotlight would be a Catholic movie too. David Daleiden, who along with his partner Sandra Merritt faces the threat of imprisonment, is a devout Catholic layman — a lover of the Latin Mass. In the decades when Planned Parenthood was worming its way into respectability by frightening mainline Protestants about the threat of “excessive” fertility among U.S. blacks, Jews and immigrants, the Catholic church took the lead in combating its propaganda.

Our bishops fought against the laws that Planned Parenthood successfully imposed in 13 states, mandating the sterilization or castration of people who failed that era’s primitive, culturally biased IQ tests. (The Nazis modeled their own eugenic laws on those which Planned Parenthood had written, and flew in friends of Margaret Sanger like Harry Laughlin to advise them on how to implement them.) American Catholics like Archbishop John Ryan argued that the best way to help the poor was to grow the economy and offer their children jobs, instead of culling them like a herd.

When eugenics somehow lost its luster in the wake of the Holocaust, Planned Parenthood switched its story, and discovered that instead of a flood of “human weeds” (again, Sanger’s words), what threatened social progress was a “population explosion” that would devastate the planet — resulting in massive famines and resource wars, as doomsters such as Paul Ehrlich warned America on the Johnny Carson show.

Again, Sanger’s story sold, and again the Catholic church stood almost alone in rejecting Planned Parenthood’s solution: massive contraception, and now abortion — in some places like China, coerced abortion, a policy which the local Planned Parenthood energetically helped to implement.

An Ecumenical Fight

Today the pro-life, pro-family movement is happily ecumenical. The worst Catholic bishops are as bad as any mainline Protestant leader, and the best Protestant laymen are praying alongside priests and nuns outside of clinics across the country. We are joining hands to support pro-life, pro-family candidates, and marching together to defend our First Amendment freedoms.

There is no sense in waiting for Hollywood to celebrate our heroes; we’ll have to do that ourselves. And we won’t see too many more heroes stepping forth if we let the corrupt legal machineries of the Culture of Death send brave reporters to prison. I hope that you will consider sending support to David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt’s legal defense. Go visit the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund and please give what you can.

By way of ending, let me share with you the latest fruit of these two journalists’ hard work, a newly released video exposing Planned Parenthood’s criminal activities: