Since seeing the movie “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe investigation of sexual abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it and the questions it raises—about how far institutions will go to protect themselves, about who we listen to and protect, about who and what we ignore, about the power of disclosure and even conversation. It begins with a portrait of institutionalized secrecy—at a police station in Boston in 1976, where cops, a bishop, and an A.D.A. are keeping a molestation accusation quiet—and shows us the process of how the truth came to be revealed. Spotlight, the Globe’s investigative team, published its first story in its series, “Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years,” on January 6, 2002; in the next year, it published over six hundred more, using the Church’s own documents to document extensive and almost systemic abuse by clergy.

Recently, I went to the Globe offices and talked to three of the team’s journalists, Walter (Robby) Robinson (Michael Keaton in “Spotlight”), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and I called their former editor, Martin (Marty) Baron, now the editor of the Washington Post, to ask about their experiences with the story. It begins with Baron’s arrival at the Globe from his previous job at the Miami Herald. He was an outsider—“an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball,” as a character in the movie puts it—whose perspective helped him confront what others could not or would not.

Baron told me that before he got to the Globe, he knew little about the clergy sexual-abuse story. He also knew little about Boston. “I knew virtually nobody at the paper and virtually nobody in town,” he said. Copies of the Globe were shipped to him in Miami before his move. While reading them, he saw an article about Father John Geoghan, who had been accused of abusing as many as eighty-four kids. “That was in the Metro section,” he told me. “And I was struck that I hadn’t heard about the case.” The Sunday before his first day, Eileen McNamara published a column in which she noted that the plaintiffs’ attorney, Mitchell Garabedian, had accused Cardinal Bernard F. Law, of the Boston archdiocese, of knowing about Geoghan’s behavior, “and yet reassigning him, notwithstanding the serial abuse,” Baron said. The archdiocese’s lawyers denied it. “And at the end of the column, she said something to the effect of ‘The truth may never be known, because the documents are sealed.’ I was really struck by that.”

In Florida the previous year, Baron had made a stubborn, startling push for another important truth: the actual ballot numbers, via independent recount, in the Bush vs. Gore election. At the Globe, Baron said, his first day’s editorial meeting was much as it was depicted in “Spotlight.” “We went around the table and people mentioned their stories,” he said. “And I asked them about Eileen’s column and said, ‘One side’s saying one thing, we have another side saying something else. Isn’t there a way we can get at the truth?’ And people noted that the documents were under seal. I said I knew that, and I don’t know the laws of Massachusetts, but in Florida we might have wanted to go to court to unseal the documents. Had we thought of doing that? And there was dead silence in the room. I didn’t quite know how to respond.”

In “Spotlight,” that silence is explained: everyone would see it as the Globe suing the Catholic Church. Fifty-three per cent of the subscribers are Catholic, the publisher tells him. “I’ll think they’ll be interested,” Baron says. Baron is planning to meet Cardinal Law the following week, and the publisher suggests he not mention it to him.

In Boston, I sat in a conference room with Robinson, now an editor-at-large; Pfeiffer, a columnist and reporter, back at the Globe after seven years at WBUR, the Boston NPR station; and Rezendes, who is still on the Spotlight team. All three have a presence that conveys both compassion and precision; all three were brought up Catholic. Robinson has a calm focus and an unhurried manner, and he makes occasional jokes. Rezendes is thoughtful and intense. (Ruffalo has described him as having “an inner motor that really is cooking—as opposed to mine, which is usually sleepy.”) Pfeiffer talks quickly, efficiently, like a podcast played at 1.5x speed. (McAdams’s otherwise Pfeiffer-like performance doesn’t attempt this, out of respect for an audience trying to keep up.)

“I had twelve years of Catholic education,” Robinson said. “Including four years right there. My friends say I haven’t come far in life.” He pointed. We were sitting in front of a large paned window that overlooked Morrissey Boulevard and a brick building beyond it—Boston College High. “As a kid, I was an altar boy,” he said. “Now I look back and I feel blessed. I say, thank God nobody ever laid a hand on me.”

I asked what they had heard about sexual abuse in the Church before working on the investigation. Not much, they said. Like most, they considered it to be individual cases about individual priests. “This is pre-Internet,” Robinson said. “You may recall this from the film. When our visitor Phil Saviano”—the leader of SNAP, a survivors’ network for people abused by priests—“mentions the Gauthe case, we didn’t know. Back in the day, if there was a case in New Orleans, and there was another big case in Dallas, unless the New York Times or The New Yorker or CBS News descended upon that story and did it nationally, how would the rest of us have known about it?” The relative isolation of that era helped keep things quiet, made it harder for people to connect the dots. “So in a way, the Church was more protected. The bishops and the cardinals said, ‘Well, this is one aberrant priest.’ And they actually said this—‘We’re no different than the Methodists or the Lutherans or the Boy Scouts.’ ”

“That’s what then-Cardinal Ratzinger said,” Rezendes said. “That the percentage of abusers in the Catholic Church was no greater than the percentage of abusers in the general population.”

Robinson said, “So when we got the assignment, as an investigative unit, to look into the case of one priest who had eighty-four lawsuits against him, and a lot of speculation—how could they not have known what he was up to?—we took that on as ‘Find out about the one priest.’ ”

“Face value,” Pfeiffer said.

“And within days, in different ways, one of which is portrayed in the movie, our meeting with Phil Saviano, all of a sudden we realized that it was some much larger number. And the much larger number we thought of was a tiny fraction of what it ended up being.”

Judge Constance M. Sweeney ordered the release of additional documents on the Geoghan case in January, 2001. Robinson said, “When we started to get the documents, the thousands and thousands of pages of documents—it was how many pages on Geoghan? Ten thousand pages?”