BishopAccountability.org
	Casting a Real Doubt By Christopher Arnott Hartford Advocate November 12, 2010 http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/stage-articles/casting-a-real-doubt-049403 Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning play Doubt: A Parable dramatized the frustrations of a nun at a Catholic school who suspects a priest has been molesting a student. She’s blindsided in all her attempts to uncover the truth. Such frustrations have consumed clergy, laity and congregations worldwide since evidence began mounting around a decade ago of how some Catholic leaders concealed widespread allegations of sexual abuse. When the charges became public, the church still tried to control the story by keeping court transcripts and legal depositions sealed. A few constitutional challenges later, those records are finally getting released. The Diocese of Bridgeport had to turn over documents about ten months ago — 12,000 pages worth. The media and activist groups have organized and indexed this mountain of raw data. It’s the Bridgeport chapter of Voice of the Faithful, an activist group formed to address the abuse problem, which developed the unorthodox, though not unprecedented, idea of presenting the transcripts as theater. (The Nov. 13 performance is followed by a panel discussion featuring Barbara Blaine, president of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, and Terry McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org.) “There’s a script,” insists author Joseph O’Callaghan, a lifelong Catholic and a retired professor of history who taught at Fordham University for 40 years. He constructed Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned—Priestly Abuse in the Diocese of Bridgeport so it would have central characters and a narrative structure. Of the 32 priests accused of sexual abuse in the Bridgeport diocese, Bless Me Father focuses on four in particular — Charles Carr, Martin Federici, Laurence Brett and Raymond Pcolka — but also includes dialogue between attorneys, bishops, monsignori and abuse victims. Except for the subtraction of some repetitions and stammers and the addition of some clarifying narrative remarks, O’Callaghan says the script is “all verbatim from transcripts.” He describes a scene in which a man who says he’d been abused by a priest as a child explains why he finally came forward as an adult — and why he was not seeking a financial settlement. “I’m coming forward because I believe the church has got a problem here.” Befitting a church that has always appreciated the value of pomp and ceremony, O’Callaghan and his fellow Voice of the Faithful members decided not to stage the script themselves but to hand it over to accomplished local director/playwright Jack Rushen, who was able to rustle up a cast of 15 area actors. In another wise theater-minded decision, Bless Me Father will be presented as a reading, with the actors in simple black attire. Too much costuming or design could only prove distracting. Other plays have been devised from transcripts and oral histories — like Are You Now or Have You Ever Been… (drawn from congressional hearings during the Hollywood blacklist) to The Laramie Project (Moises Kaufman & Tectonic Theatre’s investigation into the death of Matthew Shepard). They’ve shown not only that truth is greater than fiction, but that when bringing such horrific real-life community issues to an audience, understatement and decorum are crucial tools. If this reading “goes well,” O’Callaghan says it may be done more elaborately elsewhere.
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