PARK CITY (UT)
Toledo Blade
By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
PARK CITY, Utah - A father sits down with his 8-year old daughter. When daddy was very young, he explains, a priest did very bad things to him - sexually abused him. The little girl doesn't say anything, and it's hard to tell whether she understands.
So he goes further, and gets more graphic. He drops bombshells.
The point is, the father says, that the man who did those things to daddy lives a few houses away and daddy just found this out, and daddy wouldn't have moved into this neighborhood if he had known the man lived here. So if you ever see this man, if you fall on your bike and even if you're bleeding all over the street, and this man wants to help, the father says, tell him to go away.
That father is Tony Comes, a Toledo firefighter who filed a lawsuit against the Toledo Catholic Diocese in 2002 alleging that former Toledo priest Dennis Gray sexually molested him when Mr. Comes was a teenager. And that scene, one of a number of harrowing moments of blunt force, plays out in Twist of Faith, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the Toledo Catholic Diocese sex-abuse scandal that debuted here at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend.
Twist of Faith is the most deeply affecting film I've seen at the festival this year. After viewing it, you are angry or mournful or both.
Posted by kshaw at January 26, 2005 05:45 AM