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(More customer reviews)For me there were two key scenes in "Our Fathers," the 2005 Showtime movie about the sexual abuse and scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in Boston. The first is when a group of hardhats makes a crude sexual remark to Olan Horne (Chris Beauer), one of the men who was abused when he was a boy. They all laugh and the victim gets in their face and tells them exactly what happened. You would think this would make these jerks shut up, but when he turns and leaves another one of them makes another remark. Which requires another victim (Daniel Baldwin) to get it that idiot's face. But clearly the chain will remain unbroken, because these are people who will never learn. Throughout the movie there are those who will refuse to accept the truth, which is part of the reason that it kept happening over and over again, just like the cruel jokes in this scene.
The second comes after Horne knocks on the door of Cardinal Bernard Law (Christopher Plummer) and is not only able to talk to head of the Boston archdiocese but actually convinces the Cardinal to go with him to a meeting of the victims. Such a meeting clearly constitutes too little too late, and I totally agree that Law had to resign, but I was moved by the idea that Law remembered what it was like to be a priest who looks out for his parishioners. That does not take away from the tragedy, but it does make Law human and underscore that if he or somebody else in authority had done the right thing the lives of countless young boys would not have been ruined (What would have been the right thing? Well, I would argue that along with forgiveness and treatment, expelling the priests should have been part of the deal [I would not expect the Church to turn priests over to temporal authorities any more than I expect it to do the same with its parishioners).
I hope that the screenplay by Thomas Michael Donnelly ("The Garden of Redemption"), based on the book by David France, was not taking too many liberties with regards to these scenes, especially the second one. I understand that having Cardinal Law watching Richard Barton being executed in Canterbury Cathedral in "Becket" when he reaches the decision to resign is poetic license rather than something that is historically documented (at least I assume it is). Then again, I also appreciate the irony, since after Law's resignation Pope John Paul II (Jan Rubes) gave the former Boston archbishop the title archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica, a largely ceremonial post often given to retired prelates. You see, the basilica houses not only the body of Pope St. Pius V, but also the brains, tunic, and at least part of the head of St. Thomas a Becket. It might be another unwarranted one, but I assume Donnelly knows this odd little fact.
"Our Fathers" is a bit sketchy at times, mainly because it tries to cover so much ground and so many characters. Lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson) is the character that has the privileged hero role in the narrative, but more because he is in the position to tie all of the threads together and not because what he does is any more heroic than the men who came forward to say what happened to them when there were boys. Father Dominic Spagnolia (Brian Dennehy) is another key but minor character because he shows that even as all of this was being brought into the light, the Church continued to knock down those whose sin was speaking the truth. A television movie can hardly be faulted for not really explaining why the church hierarchy did what it did. We know that Cardinal Law was scarcely the first prelate to cover up the sexual abuse of priests, and there was a point where the veil of secrecy became de facto policy rather than a conscious decision. But there was never a point in the past or in the present where any of this was right and part of the horror of it all is that it is unbelievable that the people who knew did not know any better when it came to cleaning God's house.
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