HBO's 'Priestly Sins' long on sensation, imprecision

National Catholic Reporter, May 24, 1996 by Raymond A. Schroth

As soon as we see the archbishop of Chicago, we know he is corrupt.

No, not Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, but the squat, chubby, oily archbishop of Chicago in the new Richard Gere thriller, "Primal Fear."

We know he is corrupt because we first see him surrounded by the rich and well-connected at a swanky fundraising gala where his boys 'choir is entertaining and where he makes a lame, tasteless joke about the confessional to the polite chuckles of the guests.

So we're not surprised, as we watch him emerge from his bathroom and dress the next morning, to see a knife slash out from the corner of the screen and cut his fingers off. Nor are we surprised to discover during the attempted-murder trial that the diocese was tied up in crooked property deals with the connivance of a good Catholic" district attorney. Or that the archbishop would "get off" by videotaping the altar boy accused of trying to kill him as the boy has three-way sex with both his girl" and boyfriend.

What should surprise us is that Hollywood has decided the American moviegoing audience is now ready to buy as credible a plot line where one of the nation's most prominent prelates is a pervert.

But, unfortunately, "Primal Fear" leaps right from the headlines of recent months and years. The previous archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal John Cody, was exposed in the Chicago press for having a longterm relationship with a woman he described as his cousin, and was said to lie behind the central character in Andrew Greeley's novel, The Cardinal Sins. Bernardin, everyone knows, thanks to CNN, was accused of sexual abuse by a former seminarian. Perhaps not everyone knows the accuser later admitted having lied. In New Orleans, the local district attorney, out of misguided respect for the church, was slow to prosecute a priest caught videotaping the sex acts of boys he picked up in the French Quarter.

Since all these images are well-established in the public mind, I had hoped that the recent HBO/BBC special, "America Undercover: Priestly Sins: Sex and the Church," might move the discussion of priests and sex in a new direction -- although the fact that the producer's previous documentaries were called "Naked Hollywood" and "Naked News" did warn me to keep my hopes under control.

I am as aware as anyone of the limitations, even dangers, of obligatory celibacy. As Jesuit Fr. John Courtney Murray wrote in "The Dangers of the Vows" in Woodstock Letters, a man without a woman risks perpetual childishness. "Your typical bachelor is proverbially crotchety, emotionally unstable" petulant and self-enclosed. ... Your religious risks being the same."

Furthermore, the man without a woman, who has not learned to give and receive the love of friendship, can end up putting other things in his life -- money, comfort, booze, food, drugs, prestige, power, boys or other men's women -- in the place where a good woman should be.

But "Priestly Sins" is a superficial, oversimplified and sensationalistic treatment of a topic that deserves documentary television's best effort.

First of all, much of what "Priestly Sins" says is undeniably true. Priestly failures to live up to the obligations of celibacy and the various attempts of the hierarchy to cover up these offenses are a great scandal, certainly one of the most damaging scandals of the modern church. Whether former priest, author and therapist Richard Sipe is correct when he calls this a "crisis larger than any crisis since the fourth century" is for historians to debate.

Still, the problem Jason Berry exposed 11 years ago in NCR and four years ago in his landmark book on priestly pedophilia, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, has not gone away. Although Berry has been writing a book on jazz and Southern culture, callers and correspondents continue to send him evidence of unpublicized abuses.

So we cannot dismiss the HBO documentary's bad news by lamenting its shortcomings.

The bad news focuses on four cases. A Milwaukee woman graphically describes how, when she was 7, her parish priest -- "a very evil man" -- undressed her, penetrated her and used her to masturbate him. A young man tells how his parish priest took him to a cabin for oral sex. Another young man, who appears on camera with his family but who will not speak, escaped a nine-year abusive relationship with the parish priest by joining the Navy. While her husband was away in the service, a Rhode Island woman was seduced by the priest who had performed their wedding ceremony.

In each case, the priest used his pastoral role to insinuate himself into a relationship that he would sexually exploit. One victim declares now that she can "no longer trust the Catholic church," and warns viewers that "priests can never be trusted." A Chicago priest, Fr. Dominic Grassi, says that as a result of the misbehavior of his fellow priests, he has been professionally and personally hurt and now has to "prove himself," as if all priests are presumed guilty until they demonstrate otherwise.

How much of this goes on? Here the show gets a little shaky. Sipe, whose interview gets the program's tone, says 20 to 28 percent of priests are sexually involved with women and 15 percent in homosexual activity, yet he tells us nothing about how he arrived at those figures.