NEW YORK -Our Fathers confronts a subject that seems all too ripe for exploitation: sexually abusive priests in the Catholic Church.
But while dramatizing the tragedy, this Showtime film avoids the pitfalls of melodrama. It focuses not on the squalid crimes but on their disastrous effect -as well as on the courage of the victims who spoke up. Our Fathers premieres at 8 p.m. EDT Saturday.
Reflectively, somberly, the story unfolds: In early 2002, the Boston Globe exposed Father John J. Geoghan as well as Cardinal Bernard Law, who not only failed to stop years of sexual abuse by Geoghan and other Boston clergy but tried to hide it.
Contacted initially by just a handful of victims (abused boys now grown to troubled, shame-filled adulthood), attorney Mitchell Garabedian took on the archdiocese. The church's response, even in the face of damning evidence of abuse that spanned decades, was disavowal and further cover-up.
John Geoghan's transgressions were not the fault of a caring church
Law declares in a sermon in the film, but the aberrant act of one depraved man.
Even so, in December 2002, Law resigned under pressure as archbishop of Boston and was forced to give depositions that helped pave the way to a settlement between the archdiocese and Garabedian's clients: $10 million awarded to more than 86 plaintiffs. (In all, the archdiocese of Boston has paid out nearly $100 million in settlements to some 600 victims.) 17
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