Filmmaker Sees Parallel between Red Purges and Local Prosecution of Catholic Priests

By Ralph Cipriano
Big Trial
July 22, 2013

http://www.bigtrial.net/2013/07/documentary-filmmaker-sees-parallel.html


Ken Gumbert, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, chronicles the lives of people who have fought back against historic injustices.

His 1990 documentary, Saving Grace, was about the survivors of a Communist social experiment to exterminate religion in Czechoslovakia, particularly the Catholic Church. His 1992 film, Between Two Worlds, was about a family of Ute Indians struggling to retain their native culture on a Utah reservation, amid rampant alcoholism and drug abuse. His 2003 documentary, Red Terror On The Amber Coast, was about the resistance movement in Lithuania, where people fought to the death against a Soviet campaign of mass arrests, property confiscations, and deportations to forced labor camps in Siberia.

Gumbert was in Philadelphia this week to begin shooting his latest documentary about another group of people fighting historic injustice -- Catholic priests in America falsely accused of sex abuse.

t's a subject that Gumbert is passionate about. He's a Catholic priest of 28 years, and a member of a Dominican order. He's also a film studies professor at Providence College in Rhode Island.

The origin of Gumbert's latest film project dates back to 2002. Gumbert was in California, doing research on Saving Grace, when the Catholic sex abuse scandal exploded in Boston. The priest was getting ready to fly to Europe, to interview survivors of the Communist campaign in Czechoslovakia to eliminate religion.

Saving Grace was built around interviews with people who took the church underground during the  Communist purges. A bishop Gumbert interviewed was imprisoned with Vaclav Havel, the playwright and dissident who became the first president of the Czech Republic. In jail, the bishop taught Havel, an agnostic, how to pray the rosary. Dissidents in Czechoslovakia employed the same Christian principles of passive resistance and non-violence used by Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

Saving Grace won the Gabriel Award in 2005 for the best documentary broadcast on national TV. Gumbert sees parallels between how the Communists behind the Iron Curtain treated Catholics in Czechoslovakia, and how America has treated Catholic priests accused of sex abuse.

"I noticed some shocking similarities," Gumbert said. The media's treatment of the Boston sex abuse scandal did not seem like journalism, he said, but was more of a "witch hunt."

"Catholic priests have lost their constitutional rights in America if accused of sex abuse," Gumbert flatly declares. When a Catholic priest is accused, "it is generally assumed that it's true."

"There's a historical trail that reveals that the best way to discredit the Catholic Church by its political opponents is by accusing its clergy of sexual immorality," Gumbert said. "It's the oldest trick in the book when the objective is to discredit the institution."

"That's what the Communists did" in  Czechoslovakia, Gumbert said. "They involved themselves in witch hunts with people that they thought disagreed with them. And they put them into show trials which I believe is what happened with Boston."

And possibly Philadelphia as well?

"I'm still studying it and I'm still gathering the facts," Gumbert said. "But I have this sense that what's happening in Philadelphia is the same thing that happened in Boston in 2002."

In Boston, Gumbert is chronicling the lives of two priests accused of sex abuse. 

"They were put on the shelf, their names were published as being accused, and they lost their reputations," Gumbert said.

The two accused priests, however, decided to fight back. They hired their own detectives to investigate. The detectives proved that the priests had indeed been falsely accused, Gumbert said.

But even though "it was determined that the accusations were false, and even though the archdiocese concluded that the priests were falsely accused, they're still on the shelf," Gumbert said. "Their reputations have been tarnished, their good names have been taken away from them. At the end of the day, that's all a priest has."

"I just seen this huge injustice and that's what my films are all about," Gumbert said. "This is my ministry."

Gumbert was in town to interview this reporter about the local district attorney's self-described "historic" prosecution of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Gumbert, who has done research nationally on the topic of Catholic priests falsely accused of sex abuse, says that BigTrial is doing something unique.

"You're the only serious reporter that I know that is aware of the situation, and is honest enough and is interested in the issue of fairness and civil rights to report on it," Gumbert said.

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Gumbert wasn't the only journalist visiting BigTrial recently. Also in town the week before were Jennie and Jacque Day. According to an email from Jennie Day, the two sisters are doing a research project "examining changing news environments in American cities" where newspapers suffer from "declining content."

Jennie Day is a native Pennsylvanian, engineer and lecturer in urban planning at the University of Melbourne. Her sister, Jacque Day, is a reporter who has won 11 Associated Press awards for her work with NPR affiliate WKMS-FM in Kentucky. Jacque Day has also worked as a producer for the Discovery Health Channel, and as a staff reporter for Leader Newspapers.

In Philadelphia, the Day sisters interviewed former Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney, former Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth, and former Inky columnist Tom Ferrick, among others.

The Day sisters asked more than an hour's worth of questions about my former battles with Tierney during the early 1990s, when I was the religion reporter for the Inquirer, and Tierney was the public relations guru for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The Day sisters also questioned Tierney about the subject.

"He was really open with us," Jennie Day said. The sisters are doing similar research in San Francisco and Cincinnati.

"I am beginning to suspect that every city has a journalist who is outspoken, independent and absolutely critical to know for our research," Jennie Day wrote in an email. "These are people who seem to know every corner of the city and who care deeply about it; people who are willing to say the unpopular thing and do the hard yards and back it up. In Philly, I think that's you."

The Day sisters hope to turn their research project into a book.