Has anyone else seen this documentary? I rented it the other day and it was quite disturbing, infuriating and heartbreaking.
Summary: It’s about a priest named O’Grady who spent years being moved from one parish to another in California and sexually abusing possibly hundreds of kids from the time they were little. There is no voiceover from the filmmaker, Amy Berg, but there is footage of various people who were abused, and their parents are shown as well. There is also quite a bit from O’Grady himself, as well as Roger Mahony, but only in court. O’Grady is now living freely in Ireland, to which he was deported just a few years ago.
Random remarks, questions and outrage:
How can a known and confessed serial sexual abuser be living freely anywhere? Why isn’t he in jail?
For that matter, why isn’t Mahony in jail along with him, and while we’re at it, why not Bernard Law? They spent years covering up, sidestepping, and transferring offending priests to other parishes or other states. Are they not culpable?
Why on earth is O’Grady granted a pension? He deserves something, all right, but it surely isn’t that. The families have not received any compensation that I could discern.
Over 100,000 people have come forward with allegations in the U.S. alone. This is a staggering number in itself, but it accounts for only a fraction of those who were violated. Those in other nations are only just starting to speak out about what has been done to them. Will anything ever change or improve within the church hierarchy? What does the Pope say about all this?
Why is there so much resistance to priests getting married and having families?
I felt so horrible for the Jyono family, especially the father. His pain and anger were palpable. Watching his daughter burst into tears towards the end, when her dad declares his loss of faith, is especially hard to watch.
Any thoughts or comments?
It was one of the movies I most wanted to see last year but missed. Will try to get around to seeing it eventually (the Mrs. loves docs), but the subject matter makes it “situational viewing”, if you catch my drift.
I know that in many priest abuse cases, the statute of limitations has run, and therefore there can be no prosecution.
Personally, I think that Dawkins and Harris are right on the money here - if this didn’t involve religion, people would have been more stringent about punishing offenders right up the ladder of the hierarchy. Believing that people granted special authority by God Himself could do such things would undermine or outright destroy people’s mental model of the world, so it’s easier to embrace denial.
I also believe the church fosters an internal belief that they are the most powerful, righteous, correct people on earth, and that led to the upper-level enabling and the stuff like granting pensions. To admit wrongdoing and allow transparency and accountability would greatly dilute church power, and is not compatible with self-righteousness.
My understanding of the requirement of celibacy is that it was instituted to make sure church property could not wind up inherited by descendants of priests. Basically, it was all about money, and has now been retroactively rationalized by notions of purity and dedication, which dovetails perfectly with Catholicism’s hysterically authoritarian and fearful views on sexuality.
Yeah, I used to be Catholic, how’d you guess? I want to make clear that I have huge problems with the church, but most Catholics I know (such as my father, my grandmother, and my best friend) are lovely people and I have no ill will towards them.
I saw this documentary last year, with the director in attendance.
Afterward, the audience peppered her with many of the same questions as viva’s. Her response was almost always of the same kind: basically, a resigned shrug, saying, quietly, sadly, “I wish I had an answer for you. It’s just the way it is.”
P.S. Handy tip for viewers: this is not a very good date movie.
[ol]
[li]O’Grady did his time for the few assaults he was charged with and convicted for. Since he’s spirited off to Ireland, he’s out of jurisdiction, and most of the assaults are probably beyond statute at this point.[/li][li]It would be difficult to establish that they both knew explicity what was occuring (aside from some complaints) and that they acted in a criminally negligent, much less overtly criminal manner in a conspiracy. Again, the clock may have run out on many charges, and the Church may have bought off or suppressed others from coming forward.[/li][li]This was made clear in the documentary: O’Grady has an annuity from the Church that is predicated on his not providing testimony or otherwise talking about agreements with the Church. This obviously protects the Church more than O’Grady, but O’Grady’s benefit from it is clear.[/li][li]I don’t know where the 100,000 figure comes from; about 1,500 cases of assault by Catholic clergy have been filed since the mid-'Eighties, although it is certain from the behavior and widespread coverup that far more indicidents have occured. The Church appears to have acted in this capacity primarily to protect their financial and constituancy assets. In the past few years some partial or general apologies have been offered but not to specific victims, and while the Church has been divulging information about some it has circled its wagons around others.[/li][li]The canonical answer is that priests have to exist in service of the Church and their constituants, and that having a family of their own would detract from this. (In defense of this, some will point to the teachings of John the Apostle.) Of course, the Eastern Orthodox churches allow priests (but not bishops, IIRC) to marry, and of course most Protestant Christian churches have no objection to marriage by cleragy and in fact even encourage it. (The Catholic Church as been known to acceed to local custom now and again to permit priests to marry, so it’s not a hard and fast rule even for them.) The lack of marriage itself is probably not such an issue as that this nomimally celebate lifestyle probably appeals to young adults who are confused or at odds with the conventional sexuality promoted by the Church, “putting all the rotten eggs in one basket” so to speak. It could very well be that the same individuals perpetrating these crimes would have done so otherwise in a normal vocation–certainly neither the Catholic Church, nor churches in general are the sole occupation for paedophiles–but that their ranks are amplified by the apparent acceptance they provide. Exacerbating that is that paedophiles are typically the victims of other paedophiles, and so the priesthood acts as unwittingly to enlist the ranks of paedophiles.[/li][li]Not a question, but I agree. I’m not one to cry at movies at all, but I felt the stinging behind the eyelids when the father lashes out, refusing to describe what happened to his daughter as anything but forcible rape. [/ol]It’s a very hard documentary to watch, particularly because Oliver O’Grady is such a charming, engaging individual. It’s hard to believe that he’d do such things, and even harder that he’d talk about it in such casual tones, even as he’s walking down the street, across from a playground, talking about his lustful thoughts for children. In the abstract, you’d like to hate such people and see them destroyed, or at least removed from society. On the individual level, you see that (at least in this case) they can be charming, intelligent individuals with a compulsion to do terrible things. O’Grady should have been stopped long ago, but was permitted, and even in a sense tacitly encouraged by placing him in close, unsupervised contact with children. But his admission ultimately seems insincere, more about removing the stain from his own conscience and obtaining redemption than doing anything good for his victims. He’s a bad person–one that should clearly be kept away from children, and perhaps society as a whole–but the real evil is the bureacracy of the Church and Mahoney as its agent, which acted in pure self-preservation without any consideration for the damage it wrought upon those it was supposed to lead.[/li]
Yeah, definitely not a date film. It would make an intersting double feature with Capturing the Friedmans (with the extra scenes that were removed from the theatrical cut to water it down), though.
Question #5 is utterly wrong-headed, and has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I daresay that NOBODY has ever enter the priesthood as an otherwise healthy, normal heterosexual male and then started lusting after children due to years of celibacy.
A sane, heterosexual priest may do all kinds of things to cope with his situation. He may pour himself into his work. He may take a lot of cold showers. He may start to drink too much. He may have an illicit affair with a woman on the side. Or he may resign from the priesthood. What he does NOT do is start hitting on boys.
Question #5 is wrongly placed, but not necessarily wrong-headed.
I’m a non Catholic who was trying to figure out the mystery of required celibacy for priests.
It is stated by one of the authorities in the documentary that many of the abusers are heterosexual. Who said anything about "Gay" ?
Pensions aren’t ‘granted’; they are earned by your work, and considered as part of your wages, even though you don’t get paid them until years later, when you retire. But people earn their pensions, and are vested in them as they work on the job.
I would be very uncomfortable if employers could just decide to deny pensions to employees because they don’t approve of something they have done.
Certainly, a person who has done something wrong can be sued in Civil Court, and be ordered to pay damages out of their pension. But it appears that was not done in this case.
O’Grady molested both boys and girls. We don’t know in what proportion, but he admitted to molesting at least 25 children, and when he described his feelings of attraction to children he made no distinction between girls and boys. Despite the simplistic straight/gay (or straight/sodomist) diachotomy that fills the need for such distinctions in the public consciousness, it’s clear that paedophiles lie along a different axis entirely (and within that area of sexual interest probably several distinct subcategories). It’s unlikely that the celebite lifestyle of the priesthood causes men to become paedophiles (or gay, or whatever); it’s more likely that such a choice appeals to someone who doesn’t fit the normal Church-approved marriage with children lifestyle.
It’s also not clear that paedophiles are significantly more promenant among the priesthood than in the general population, only that paedophiles there have extra-ordinary trusted access to children and have enjoyed exceptional protection from the Church in the past, leading to extensive unpunished activity in molesting children. I don’t know how many priests overall have been accused, and what percentage of the total body of the priesthood they represent, but the extensive publicity given to paedophile Catholic priests by the media probably exaggerates the breadth of the problem relative to the less publicized molestations in other quarters.
