Church Agonises, Hollywood Seizes Moment
By Karl Quinn
The Catholic Church's handling of abuse allegations will soon face the full glare of Hollywood's publicity machine, with Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studio backing a feature based on a true scandal involving paedophile priests in Boston. As yet untitled, the film will be based on a year-long series of reports by investigative journalists at The Boston Globe, which earned a Pulitzer prize in 2003. The Catholic Church's handling of the abuse scandal is increasingly rich territory for filmmakers. In 2006, Amy Berg's documentary Deliver Us From Evil looked at the case of a paedophile priest repeatedly moved around the US by church authorities well aware of his offending. Now showing is Alex Gibney's Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, which examines the abuse of boys at a deaf school in Wisconsin from the 1950s to the 1970s. A Polish feature film, In The Name Of, first shown at the Berlin Film Festival this year, takes a more sympathetic approach to the story of a homosexual priest. And the Australian-English film Oranges and Sunshine looked at the true story of one woman's fight for acknowledgement of the damage done to boys taken from their mothers and placed in church-run institutions where ''care'' was frequently delivered at the end of a strap.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.