Redemption amid brutality: for six seasons, grace was at work in HBO's 'Oz,' the most Catholic show on television

National Catholic Reporter, July 4, 2003 by Raymond A. Schroth

Sheamus O'Reily, the miserable, rotten father, arrives as a fellow prisoner; his son, Cyril, at the governor's direction and under his father's signature, has undergone shock treatments to make him "sane" enough to die.

Ryan shaves his brother's head and kisses him goodbye. Seconds before the warden pulls the switch, the red phone rings. A reprieve. But a brief one. For the last time the O'Reilys process to the death house. The warden pulls the switch. The hooded body writhes and smokes. The warden pukes on the floor.

Both the mayor and the governor are criminally corrupt. The mayor is jailed and a hired inmate slits his throat in his hospital bed.

Even the warden dies--as he staggers covered with blood into a party in his honor.

A crazy Jewish fanatic, posing as a reporter, assassinates a Muslim leader, then, incarcerated, pleads with his black cellmate to kill him.

Through all this blood, hate and squalor, grace is at work.

A new librarian, suffering from breast cancer, believes that literature can transform--or at least calm--these violent men. When a young Hispanic sentenced for manslaughter is strapped naked in a restraining chair in solitary confinement, she bribes the guard to allow her to sit outside his cell and read him Tom Sawyer through the window in his door.

The moral center of all this chaos is the psychologist nun, Sister Peter Marie Reimondo (Rita Moreno), who listens nonjudgmentally to all these sins and gently insinuates the alien thought that even in jail there is a God who loves.

Sister, isn't it right to try to survive, asks a distraught young man. Thank you, Sister. To survive, he performs oral sex and receives objects in the other end.

The young priest, Father Ray Makuda (B. D. Wong) declines to do an exorcism on a creepy, satanic death row inmate. The inmate accuses the priest of sexual abuse and the diocese removes him from ministry.

We see Father Ray at his kneeler.

When the death row inmates are posing for a commercial photographer, another inmate kills the priest's accuser in a shower of sparks by shoving a hot photo lamp down his throat.

Restored to ministry, Father Ray tells Sister Peter that he prayed his enemy would die.

Unlike anything supposedly religious on TV--like Sunday Evangelical preachers, Mother Angelica's Masses and harangues, or stories about angels--"Oz" has been about men and women, all too aware of their sinfulness, grasping for a touch of redemption.

Ryan O'Reily shares his cell with the old Irish priest sentenced for civil disobedience. The priest, who has been trying to teach Ryan to overcome his bitterness and see the good in himself, drops dead defecating in his shorts.

Ryan remembers the gospel scene where the women take Jesus from the cross and prepare him for burial. He asks permission to wash the priest's body.

Amen.

Jesuit Father Raymond A. Schroth is community professor of humanities at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J. His e-mail address is raymondschroth@aol.com