CALIFORNIA
Orange County Weekly
by GUSTAVO ARELLANO
About the only positive observation obtained from Breaking the Silence, the recent documentary produced by the Diocese of Orange ostensibly to warn kiddies about its priestly sex-abuse problem, is that our Catholic hierarchy doesn’t blame the scandal on fags. Or Jews. Or Freemasons. Or Mormons. And definitely not itself. Although the DVD’s liner notes state Breaking the Silence “has a single goal: to get teenagers to begin talking about sexual abuse,” it becomes clear even 30 seconds into the film that any discussions will—nay, must—talk about the Orange diocese’s still-fresh molestation scars in only the most abstruse of terms and wholeheartedly ignore the role church leaders played in condoning child rapes in Orange County parishes over the past three decades. And that’s just how Orange Bishop Tod D. Brown likes it. The cover-up continues.
Brown commissioned Breaking the Silence last year as part of his Covenant With the Faithful, the seven theses he infamously nailed to the doors of Holy Family Cathedral in Orange as penance for the crimes of his fellow priests. In particular, the documentary, according to an afterword, fulfills Thesis 2 of the covenant, which promised to implement “our own diocesan policies for the prevention of the abuse of children and young people.”
But nowhere in that Covenant With the Faithful was there promise of an unlimited budget, and as a result, Breaking the Silence screens like a 1950s education short on menstruation. Non-professional actors make up the cast, and it’s a hoot to see these people strain to deliver their tightly scripted lines in a supposedly spontaneous environment. The production values are barely better—stationary shots, computer graphics from the era of Pong, a terrible tabla soundtrack. The most cardinal sin, however, is the use of a really bad boom mike by executive producer (and Orange diocese spokesman) Joseph Fenton—voices sound distant or pass the red zone toward distortion too often.