a woman filmmaker has made a documentary about a famous pedophialiac priest, using footage she obtained when she went to visit him in ireland and discovered to her surprise that the priest was more than happy to chat away about his deeds and desires. she filmed him for eight days.
i could write this as a comment in the free-for-all that follows the alternet post i link to above, but i don’t have the energy to duke it out with the death penalty invokers and the castration advocates. so excuse me as i take this blog out of the purely filmic and into the political.
witch-hunt/lynching: from the description of the film, the priest sounds totally deranged. he brags about what he did, gets lascivious, indulges in details. now how cool is that? how easy is it to put a deranged man in front of a camera and allow him to crucify himself without the benefit even of a miranda warning? no wonder the man had to flee ireland. judging from the small sample on alternet, there are a lot of people out there who would like a bloody piece of him.
insight: the filmmaker interviewed the now defrocked priest for eight days. eight days? i don’t see myself watching this film, like, ever, but i sure hope it comprises more than just eight days of this man’s babblings. how about some family history? how about a thoughtful study of pedophilia as a mental disorder and as an epidemic? how about contextualization? what is there to be gained from seeing a film whose only goal is to expose a man’s thorough hatefulness?
sex obsession: clearly, same-sex pedophilia is a huge problem in the catholic church. i wish the church good luck and godspeed in figuring this one out. and i wish them wisdom in confronting the connections between same-sex pedophiliac priests and the church’s obsession with all things related to sex and birth, to the neglect of other serious “life” issues like, say, death penalty, torture, and war. would that they were a teeny-weeny bit more obsessed with those other violations of human life.
equal opportunity molestation: at the same time, one wonders why we, the american public, don’t obsess a teensy-weensy bit more about the sexual molestation endured by little girls as well as little boys at the hands of fathers brothers grandfathers cousins neighbors teachers classmates and, why not, priests. are all pedophiliac priests homosexuals? would we be so outraged if the epidemics were about the molestation of girls? i, for one, know the answer to that one: no. i know it because the percentage of girls who get molested is stratospheric, yet i see no outrage bubbling up any time soon. and if we suggest that little girls’ abuse is not as clearly and conveniently institutionalized as the molestation of boys by catholic priests, we need look no further than our foster care system, where sexual abuse is de rigeur.
other crimes: the real problem, though, i suspect, is our collective fixation on the purity of childhood, the heinous nature of sex, and the individual (vs. the collective) body. i like sex abuse like a rusty nail in the shin, but there’s a whole lot of crimes i like even less. while we follow our pedophiles with magnifying glasses, and marginalize them through disturbingly invasive regulations, we don’t find equally heinous categories of people nearly as dangerous. how about, to mention a particularly egregious case, those who intentionally and callously perpetuate abject poverty and racism? do they lose standing in society? no, they don’t. when scandals blow over, they keep their money and their power. what opprobrium attaches itself to those who let thousands of less-than-wealthy african americans rot in the superdome in new orleans? what public outrage drives to the margins of society the administrators who embezzled the money (millions) that was supposed to build housing for the people who were kicked out by the gentrification of downtown miami? in what neighborhood do we seclude cops who beat up black people? in what lazzaretto do we confine those who keep black people from voting?
discuss, or not.
I read a review of this that somewhat tempted me–it noted that the film DOES spend a lot of time with families/victims, and also spends some time poring over the Cardinal (was it Mahoney?) and his leadership allowing this to carry on.
I’m likely not to go for reasons you lay out, Gio–without in any way minimizing the events and cover-up and enormous personal impacts, the Catholic Church issues always feed so neatly into American innocence/vice engines that I have trouble imagining seeing any such film without Jim Kincaid’s seductive voice/argument providing a running commentary. And whatever the issue, I’m not particularly keen on watching cases for the prosecution, however deserved the subject being prosecuted.
I saw this last night, and attended a Q&A with the director. It’s a very thoughtful, thought-provoking film by Amy Berg (a very young filmmaker who first got involved with this story when she was with CNN). I thought I’d respond to each of Gio’s points.
Witch-hunt/lynching: O’Grady is not exactly bragging–I just don’t think that’s the right word. The term that is used in the film disassociation. He says the film is his confessional, but there’s virtually no penance, no regret, no shame. It’s a matter-of-fact confession (of the non-religious sort; it’s a criminal confession) that is delivered with a nervous smile and an occasional nervous joke. The families that are interviewed are not out for blood. They seek comfort, help, guidance, anything, from the church that they feel betrayed them. Two victims fly to Rome to visit the Vatican in the hopes of being heard, acknowledged. They are turned away by guards.
Insight: not much. The subject of this film is not pedophilia in general, so there is little to be learned. In fact, there is more to be learned about the Catholic faith (though I must say that the Catholicism that is described in this film is not the Catholicism I grew up with). There is a unnecessary emphasis on celibacy, which I found to be simply off the mark (the attitude that circulates in our culture is “let ’em fuck women, that’ll cure ’em!”). Fortunately, at the Q&A, this matter was addressed, and the filmmaker’s intentions were clarified. But the film may leave some viewers with the misguided idea that the way to deal with the crisis of child molestation in the Catholic church is to allow priests to have sex.
Sex-obsession: in the Q&A, a few members of the audience tried to connect the crisis in the Catholic church with our own failings. The film does not. Given the Foley scandal, it’s nearly impossible to avoid making connections. In conversations afterwards, I felt compelled to make a case that pedophilia is today treated the way mental illness was treated a hundred or more years ago: lock ’em up. Until our culture is prepared to really face the problem, to treat the pedophile as a person who is suffering from an illness, rather than as a monster who needs to be locked up or, in the case of the Catholic church, kept hidden, there will be more more fear, more hysteria, more hurt. What you get in Deliver Us from Evil is a portrait of a man who clearly needed help very early on. He’s a man who seems to have no idea what is happening to him, or what he is doing to others. We learned from the director that he recently fled Ireland.
Equal opportunity molestation: the film explicitly states that most sex offenders are heterosexual. Thankfully, the film steers entirely away from the ridiculous association of pedophilia with homosexuality. Instead, a priest named Tom Doyle (whose place in the Catholic church is not exactly clear) who works as a canon lawyer, historian, activist, explains (I think it’s Doyle explains this…maybe someone else does) that part of the problem is that the hierarchy treats all sexual acts among priests as equal (doesn’t matter if you have sex with a woman, a child, a cow, a corpse…it’s sex and it’s a sin). Celibacy, historically, had more to do with property than anything else (a priest, if married, could pass his house onto his wife or kids, and not the church). But today, celibacy is only part of a larger problem in the Catholic church: near-total sexual ignorance. So say many in the film
Other crimes: one fascinating revelation (and it’s heartbreaking to watch) comes when the father of one victim explains how he learned why his daughter kept the secret of her molestation for so long. “I asked her, ‘why didn’t you tell me he raped you?’ and she said ‘because you told me if anyone hurt me you would kill him…and a friend told me if my daddy killed someone he’d go to jail forever'” (I’m paraphrasing). The revelation goes on for several painful minutes. But what is revealed is how dangerous, sometimes, is our compulsion to “protect.” That’s not to say the father is to blame for not being able to stop the abuse sooner. But I think it shows the way fear and violence is embedded in the mechanisms of protection that we so heavily rely on. Less fear is needed everywhere.
thanks, john, for these thoughful comments. re: near-total sexual ignorance. i have a friend who was madly angry at abusive priests until he accepted a job with a firm that represented a large american city’s catholic diocese (much hand-wringing there). his job was not to defend abusive priests (they had their own lawyers) but to represent the hierarchy in civil suits cases. well, he was stunned by the sexual ignorance of the bishop and his helpers. they were moving abusive priests from parish to parish without helping them with their illness because they had no understanding whatsoever of it. we underestimate how easy it is to isolate ourselves from reality even in this information-saturated world. i am constantly surprised by how quickly exposure leads people to change their minds on things. too bad we cannot expose ourselves to everything without dying in the process.