CARVILLE: As a regular viewer of the show (INAUDIBLE) I'm really not a movie or TV critic and rarely, if ever, offer my opinion on what's going on in film and television. However, (INAUDIBLE) the night show (ph) time will air a repeat of a made for television movie called "Our Fathers" which is an account of the pedophile scandal which plagued the Boston archdiocese.

In my opinion, it is as good as television gets. It was superbly done. And it really gave you the sense of the agony that these criminals from Cardinal Owen down caused the people of Boston archdiocese. Showtime deserves an enormous amount of credit for airing this. And everybody involved for this superb production should feel very good about what they have done. The shame of Cardinal Law, father of the Roman Catholic Church, is apparent. And also apparent the church continues to shame itself by allowing him to be the Arch Priest of St. Mary Major, one of the great facilities of Christendom. Here's hoping that the new pope roots him out of this position and sends him to Hades to clean bed pans.

"Our Fathers"
Tonight at 8 on Showtime

FINALLY, a TV movie that tells the truth about the vile and repulsive pedophile priest scandal that rocked the Catholic Church — but not nearly to the point it should have.

Tonight's extremely well-done Showtime original movie is the true story, based on Newsweek reporter David France's best seller, "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal," of the discovery of priests in the Boston Diocese who raped and sodomized boys without consequence for five decades.

Yes — for 50 years, there was wholesale institutionalized and tacit approval of child rape by priests.

Starring a breathtakingly good, not to mention courageous cast, the movie traces the story as it began to unfold a few years ago, first in the Boston Globe, and then in Newsweek, and then nationally.

"Our Fathers" begins when the decades-long cover-up by Cardinal Bernard Law, (or Lawless, more accurately), first comes to light with the fact that Law failed to stop the abuses by Father John J. Geoghan.

One attorney, Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson), actually went door-to-door to find families whose children had been abused decades earlier.

He even finds one mother, Mary Ryan, (Ellen Burstyn) who says, yes, she knew Father Geoghan — and so did her seven boys, all of whom, she later discovered, had been molested by the sick freak-of-a-priest.

She, in fact, even has saved the registered letters that she had sent to Cardinal Law years earlier detailing the abuse she'd discovered. She was told to shut up.

Victims, whose bright futures were destroyed by years of abuse by Geoghan and other priests who preyed on these children like the monsters in a Grimm's fairytale, began to come out of the woodwork in Boston.

One priest, Father Spagnolia, (Brian Dennehy), was courageous enough to stand up and speak out about the horrifying and disgusting practices from the pulpit and ironically, (or not, actually), he was the one forced to leave the church when it was leaked that he'd had a relationship with another man (not child!) when he took a hiatus from the priesthood years earlier.

Daniel Baldwin stars as victim Angelo DeFranco, whose life was destroyed by pedophile priests and finally comes forward with proof of what happened to him as a child.

Rocked by the scandal and facing millions in lawsuits, Law (Christopher Plummer) is called to the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul (Jan Rubes) who tells him, "Holy Mother Church does not make sacrifices on the altar of public opinion — and know you have my support."

Even after it came out that literally thousands of boys in the U.S. had been sodomized for generations under the unblinking eye of the church, including many whom Law refused to punish, the church and the Vatican did nothing but give lip service to the scandal.

While Father Spagnolia and another priest (who'd had a relationship with a woman) were forced to leave the priesthood, most of those who didn't get nailed by the cops still live and pray (or is that prey) within the world of the church.

And Law? He was punished by the pope with a cushy job at, yes, The Vatican.

Clearly moved by the horror of the scandal, every actor plays their parts to understated perfection. Christopher Plummer, as Law, perfectly captures the cool, detatched, ambitious monster who covered it all up. Danson, as the odd-ball attorney, is fantastic, and Baldwin as DeFranco plays it out without playing it up. If the scandal rocked you, or even if it didn't, don't miss "Our Fathers."

[Photo: "Our Fathers" airs on Showtime Saturday. Greg Heisler/Showtime]

Some moments of "Our Fathers" play like a horror film: The twisted predator approaches as an innocent shudders with fear in his bed. The children’s faces say it all in these scenes.

"Horror" certainly describes the reality of sexually abusive priests preying on kids in the Boston Diocese for five decades.

But the brief abuse scenes here are not done for shock value; the mostly discreet flashbacks represent a thick historical record pointing straight to the church hierarchy. The blame for inaction and cover-up quickly moves to Cardinal Bernard Law.

Showtime tells the sordid story in a Dan Curtis film at 8 Saturday night, based on Newsweek writer David France’s best-selling book. It’s an absorbing story of monstrous secrets, shame, evil, tragedy (many of the abused committed suicide or led troubled lives) and cover-up.

Christopher Plummer plays the Hamlet-like figure Law, who says at his deposition that he "relied on his bishops (for) ... day-to-day decisions." When the scandal broadens and lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson) presses the case in court and in the Boston Globe, the cardinal groans that he believed at the time that the offending priests might somehow be reformed when he moved them around to new parishes (and new victims).

Eventually, he begs forgiveness from a victim who comes to his house, and then at a well-attended meeting of a victims’ group. He soon offers to resign in a meeting with Pope John Paul II (played pretty convincingly by Jan Rubes).

Brian Dennehy plays a straight-talking priest who condemns the scandal from his own pulpit, but then is accused of having a gay affair during the time he left the priesthood. Any wonder why pay cable jumped on this one? (The film does include rough language and graphic descriptions of sexual abuse.)

The film begins by showing the beginnings of scandal involving Father John Geoghan’s stunning trail of degradation and betrayal of youth. One of his victims, Angelo DeFranco (a composite of several people played by Daniel Baldwin), comes forward years later after he hears a TV report about Geoghan (who would eventually be slain in prison).

The Office of Film and Broadcasting for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops calls the film (shot in and around Toronto) a "handsome production" but also calls it "one-sided" (from the victims’ POV) and doesn’t show enough reform by the church.

"One … bit of dramatic license that cries out for correction is a written postscript … that reads, ‘Although a one-strike policy was approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, there is no formal mechanism to enforce it.’"

The COCB points out that at least 700 priests have been removed from ministry in Catholic dioceses "on account of the commitment made by the bishops in (a policy) adopted in June 2002."

But also post-script: Cardinal Law was given a job at the Vatican by Pope John Paul.

Connecticut-raised Dennehy, in a press release, says the story is personal for him because a family in his hometown had a son who had been abused by a priest. And as an adult, that son committed suicide.

Showtime drama unforgettably dramatizes church abuse scandal There's only one negative about Our Fathers. It's on Showtime.

This isn't a knock on Showtime, which deserves plaudits for making a fact-based movie the commercial networks wouldn't touch. The subject matter is too incendiary: priests sexually molesting young boys. It's just unfortunate Showtime doesn't have the reach that Our Fathers, one of the most powerful movies in memory, deserves.

The ever-growing numbers of victims of sexual abuse by priests has had almost a numbing effect. Our Fathers is a reminder that there is a face on each of the thousands of victims and that many of those individuals have not and never will recover from the grotesque betrayal by someone in whom they had put, well, their faith. Many have been unable to sustain healthy adult relationships. Some have been driven to suicide.

The film boasts a constellation of stellar performances, forceful yet never out of control. Ted Danson once again demonstrates his under-recognized versatility with a commanding dramatic turn as Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who had the courage to take on the Catholic Church in Boston, the equivalent of challenging the mullahs in Tehran. The courts and even the respected Boston Globe are in the church's pocket until the magnitude of the offenses forces attitude adjustments.

Christopher Plummer also shines as Cardinal Bernard Law, the head of Boston's Catholic Church, who, almost inarguably, is as responsible for the abuse as the priests who shamed their calling with their aberrant behavior. Plummer effectively portrays Cardinal Law not as an evil man but as a man who enabled evil to happen.

The crux of the movie isn't that priests molested young boys. That has become a given. It's that Cardinal Law's cover-up is worse than the crimes. By shifting deviant priests from parish to parish over almost a quarter-century and denying from the pulpit that the molestations are anything beyond isolated incidents, Cardinal Law does nothing to alleviate the problem. He merely relocates it, transferring priests to new congregations, where there are fresh victims to be plucked. One whistle-blower among his clergy reports his reward was to be transferred to a remote outpost outside the country.

When the factual evidence against him becomes overwhelming and unassailable, Cardinal Law, with the assistance of the pope, beats it out of town to a cushy post in the Vatican.

Daniel Baldwin elevates his B game to A-minus as Angelo DeFranco, a bitter, tortured victim of the notorious Father John J. Geoghan. DeFranco recruits Garabedian and does much of the legwork that is crucial in bringing down Cardinal Law.

A key piece of the puzzle comes from a woman named Mary Ryan, who had the foresight to maintain a record of a letter she sent to Cardinal Law more than 20 years previously outlining the scope of the abuses of some priests. Ellen Burstyn is a name for the marquee more than a strong presence in an in-and-out performance as Ryan, a mother whose seven boys were all molested by Geoghan.

Brian Dennehy is characteristically superb as Father Dominic Spagnolia, an admirably insolent priest with a profane tongue, who also challenges Cardinal Law's cover-up, branding him another Nixon.

Our Fathers is a movie that will not and should not be forgotten by anyone who gets the opportunity to see it. It's too bad that number will be so limited.

Tom Jicha can be reached at tjicha@sun-sentinel.com.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
on tv
Program: Our Fathers
Stars: Ted Danson, Christopher Plummer, Daniel Baldwin, Brian Dennehy
Airs: 8 and 10:15 tonight on Showtime; encores 12:30 a.m. Sunday and 8 p.m. Wednesday
Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

[Photo: Measured Performances: Brian Dennehy, Christopher Plummer and Ted Danson star in Our Fathers.]

• Our Fathers, 8-10:15 tonight. Showtime

It's easy to lose track of how remarkably television has changed in a very short time. It's scarcely imaginable that a medium that nearly suffered a collective meltdown barely a decade ago over a lesbian kiss on L.A. Law is now attempting a serious dramatic work on the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal.

''Attempting'' is not really the right word, because Our Fathers is an overwhelming success on every level: as riveting drama, as delicate character study, as moral indictment. Best of all, it clings resolutely to its humanity even as it careens through utterly inhuman terrain.

Our Fathers is set in 2002, as the scandal involving the church's coverup of scores of cases of child molestation by priests in the Boston diocese erupts in courtrooms and the media. It concentrates mainly on the efforts of a scruffy attorney named Mitchell Garabedian, whose seemingly quixotic battle with the powerful diocese eventually uncovered scores of victims.

Ultimately Garabedian forced the release of 30,000 pages of documents revealing that the coverup stretched to the very top of the diocese. It cost the church millions of dollars in settlements as well as the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law.

As the story unfolds, Our Fathers branches out, juggling flashback tales of victims and their abusers with behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the church to control the damage to its image and finances. Not the least of Our Fathers achievements is the way Thomas Michael Donnelly's script (adapted from former Newsweek correspondent David France's book) manages to keep such a sprawling story focused and moving.

The Dantesque acts it shows -- priests molesting boys while blessing them, while consoling them after the deaths of parents, and even taking them out of parochial school classes to abuse them in counseling rooms -- are horrifying.

But Our Fathers is equally adept at depicting the way the molestations echoed through the lives of their victims over the years, destroying their bonds with not just the church but their parents, society and even God himself. Says one victim, brokenly recalling his first encounter with a predatory priest: ``I was looking outside the whole time, at the cross on the church steeple. I kept thinking, where was Jesus? I thought he was gonna come running in like the cavalry. I was 12.''

Our Fathers might easily have turned into an anti-Catholic jihad. But while documenting in icy detail the public arrogance of Cardinal Law, it portrays him in private not as a monster but a man with tragically misplaced loyalties. To a dumbfounded John Paul II, struggling to understand how the Boston diocese reeled so far out of control, Law tearfully explains: ``I tried hard to keep my heart open for those priests.''

Christopher Plummer plays Law as a man slowly sinking in moral and legal quicksand, continually horrified that his every effort to extricate himself only makes things worse. It is one of many carefully measured performances in Our Fathers, including Ted Danson as Garabedian and Brian Dennehy as Father Dominic Spagnolia, a priest who defiantly challenges the diocese hierarchy over the coverup, but is keeping his own dangerous secrets. Their reserve meshes well with the volcanic rage of the victims and their families, including Daniel Baldwin, Ellen Burstyn and Chris Bauer (The Wire). If there's a signature moment in Our Fathers, it might be Bauer's tortured plea to an uncomprehending Cardinal Law: ``We were just kids.''

Glenn Garvin it The Herald's television critic.

Last month during the funeral of Pope John Paul II, there was certainly no shortage of positive TV coverage of the Roman Catholic Church. Images of young pilgrims in St. Peter's Square and endless words about a beloved leader who had built a ministry of reaching out, portrayed the church largely as a dynamic, open and loving institution.

Tonight, television offers a decidedly different take on the Catholic church with the premiere of Showtime's Our Fathers, a searing film about the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests and a systematic cover-up that extended all the way to John Paul II, according to this made-for-TV gospel. Our Fathers, based on the best seller Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal by Newsweek's David France, is not at all shy about naming the names of alleged sinners, while fully exploring the suffering of their child victims.

Elevating the film above docu-drama sensationalism, however, are outstanding performances by Christopher Plummer, Daniel Baldwin and Ted Danson, along with a keen understanding of social class and power on the part of producer-director Dan Curtis and screenwriter Thomas Michael Donnelly. Rather than a melodramatic rendering of one-dimensional sinners, victims and advocates, Our Fathers tells a far richer story of believable human beings struggling to find their way in a universe where some of those designated as moral guides had gone astray or looked the other way when they knew their confederates were doing evil.

Near the top of that list of those responsible for failing the trust of Catholic children in this telling is Cardinal Bernard Law (Plummer), who acknowledged secretly moving abusive priests from parish to parish in Boston during his tenure. Last year, after being forced to resign as archbishop of Boston, Law was appointed archpriest of the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, where on April 11 he celebrated a Mass of mourning for John Paul II despite widespread protests against him serving in such an honored role.

With a performance built on tiny physical gestures - a trembling hand, dismissive movements of his head toward inferiors, and a tendency to ignore all questions - Plummer creates a portrait of a weak man corrupted by power rather than an evil monster. Still, the horror of the deeds allowed by Law are powerfully felt in the film.

Donnelly and Curtis generate that impact through their sensitive renderings not just of the moments of abuse, but also the ongoing effects into adult life on some of the victims. Baldwin and Chris Bauer - as two of the Boston area, working-class men tormented into adulthood by memories of abuse - become the moral center of the film through the pain and integrity of the characters they bring to life.

Danson is the one who keeps the film from sinking into the darkness of its subject matter. As a struggling attorney who gets no respect but won't give up the fight on behalf of his victim-clients, he brings energy and generates joy. Danson delivers the kind of uplifting, champion-of-the-underdog performance that wins Emmys.

Our Fathers is surely not what Vatican officials had in mind last month when they talked about bringing the church into the age of television. But Showtime has served the medium and viewing public well in its telling of this sordid tale.

"Our Fathers" airs tonight at 8 on Showtime.

The Roman Catholic Church made headlines recently as Catholics all over the world paid homage to the late Pope John Paul II and celebrated the election of his successor, Pope Benedict XVI. But less than three years ago, the headlines had an entirely different tenor.

The sex abuse scandal that started with revelations in the Boston Diocese has spurred hundreds of media stories and numerous books.

But Showtime's "Our Fathers," tonight at 8, marks the first time the entertainment industry has produced a film about the scandal.

Based on Newsweek reporter David France's best-seller, the film stars Ted Danson as Boston lawyer Mitchell Garabedian and Christopher Plummer as Cardinal Bernard Law, who covered up decades of sex abuse allegations in the Boston Diocese.

"[The story] had everything that I thought would make a really riveting picture," said director Dan Curtis. "Then comes the difficulty of something that's as touchy as this. How do you do it? It's kind of simple in a strange way. You just tell the truth."

Danson, who plays the crusading lawyer who extracted a multimillion-dollar settlement from the Boston Diocese, had sought guidance from a higher power.

"I talked to my mother," said Danson.

Danson's parents converted from Episcopalian to Catholicism when they were in their 50s after getting to know an group of Carmelite monks who have a monastery in the Arizona city where they live.

"I listened to her fear and hope that there would be at the end of the film some sense of hope," he said, "that it wouldn't just be about tearing the church down.

"I instinctively thought that the film would not do that," he continued, "but I feel very happy having seen it that the film is about hope."

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, had yet to see the film yesterday but planned to watch it tonight. However, he said that he read France's book and feels it presents a fair accounting of what went on in Boston.

"If they stick to what happened in Boston," he said, "and present an honest portrayal of how these people were ripped off by these priests, fine, go get 'em."

"Our Fathers" is not about the Catholic church, said Curtis, rather, it's the story of the victims.

Curtis' plan was not to use the real names of the victims out of deference for what they went through. But, he said, they insisted that he did.

"They wanted to stand up and be out there," he said.

Curtis' other concern was how to present Cardinal Law.

"What I didn't want with Law," said Curtis, "was anybody feeling sorry for him. I wanted people to see what he was going through, but I didn't want any sympathy for him because this never should have happened."

[Photo: Ted Danson, James Oliver & Daniel Baldwin co-star tonight.]

In a Boston bar, a distraught man joins a lawyer at a table and drops an ice cube into a glass of water.

"That's me," the man says, indicating the ice cube. "The part underneath the water. The part you haven't seen yet."

The man is Angelo DeFranco (Daniel Baldwin), a fortysomething construction worker whose life has been a mess since childhood, when a priest named John Geoghan molested him. The ice cube is his version of the tip-of-the-iceberg analogy: For every crime you see, many more stay hidden.

The lawyer is Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson), who is trying to prove not only that the church's local ranks include pedophiles, but that Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law (Christopher Plummer) helped them evade punishment.

Based on Newsweek writer David France's same-titled nonfiction book, it's a straightforward, sincere, occasionally simplistic TV movie, better acted than directed, and better directed than written.

Yet the psychic damage inflicted on Boston children by a handful of pedophiles is so painful to contemplate -- and articulated with such raw anguish by Baldwin, "The Wire" costar Chris Bauer and other actors portraying real-life victims -- that there are times when you can hardly bear to look at the screen.

The scandal broke in 2002, when the Boston Globe ran articles alleging that a handful of Boston-area priests had been molesting local kids for decades without serious repercussions.

To invoke Watergate -- a scandal referred to at least twice in "Our Fathers" -- it's not the crime that topples the powerful, it's the cover-up.

The case alleged that several Boston area priests were serial child molesters, and that their superiors protected them from punishment and shielded the cases themselves from public view by convincing Boston courts to place incriminating evidence under seal.

Garabedian got around the seal by copying letters that proved Law knew about the allegations and attaching the letters to routine legal documents sent to the church, effectively removing the evidence from under seal and putting it in general circulation.

Garabedian inflicted further damage on Law by re-framing his civil case as a criminal one, accusing Law of conspiracy to cover up child molestation, a felony.

Geoghan was sentenced to 10 years in prison for indecent sexual assault on a minor and was later killed in his cell. Law was eventually forced to resign his position and to give multiple depositions admitting his role in the cover-up. (He wasn't exactly punished, though; he was moved to Rome and last month was chosen to celebrate one of nine official Masses to mourn Pope John Paul II.)

"Our Fathers" is fueled by outrage over abuse of power, particularly abuse inflicted on working-class and poor families who lack the means to defend their interests.

Thomas Michael Donnelly's screenplay points out that Garabedian's deposition of Law marked the first time a high church official was subjected to criminal deposition in the United States.

It also notes that in the 1960s, when Geoghan was first caught molesting a minor in a working-class neighborhood, the church reassigned him to a pricier parish, but whenever he got the urge again, he revisited his old stomping grounds.

"Our Fathers" depicts the abuse in elliptical flashbacks, using anguished close-ups to suggest what's happening rather than actually showing it. Director Dan Curtis' filmography is heavy on horror movies, including the vampire soap "Dark Shadows." While he mostly stays on the right side of subtlety, some of the movie's grimmest scenes feel overdone, and the script veers toward Oliver Stone-ism, spelling out ideas and feelings already made clear by the images and performances.

Danson brings an intriguingly combative, obsessive edge to Garabedian. We didn't need to be told, repeatedly, that he's a righteous man who doesn't really care about the money.

And a subplot involving Father Spangnolia (Brian Dennehy) -- a Boston-area priest who dared to publicly criticize Law and who was hit with unsubstantiated molestation charges, then eventually outed as homosexual and forced to leave the Church -- feels shoehorned into the movie, to explain to slow-witted viewers that homosexuality and pedophilia are not synonyms.

While no one can fault the filmmakers for sympathizing with victims rather than abusers, there are times when the script stacks the deck, transforming what should have been a social tragedy into a good guys vs. bad guys legal thriller, a la John Grisham.

While the abusers committed evil acts, they weren't demons, but sick, weak men who found their way into positions of influence. By rights, the film should reserve most of its ire for church officials who protected the abusers from exposure and punishment.

Ironically, however, Law emerges as the film's most complicated, emotionally detailed character -- a man so in thrall to his institution, his bosses and his position of privilege that he couldn't bring himself to do the right thing.

"I don't trust you guys to baptize my kid," says Bauer's bullet-headed tough guy Olan Home, one of the few victims who managed to confront Law one-on-one. "When are you gonna take the mask off and own this thing, Bernie?"

Near the end of "Our Fathers," Law goes to Rome and tells the pope he covered for pedophile priests because "I believed with all my soul that they could change."

The children knew otherwise.

Our Fathers: Original drama based on fact, 8 p.m. Saturday, Showtime.

Showtime's "Our Fathers" may be a tale clipped -- as opposed to ripped -- from the headlines, but it's been clipped very well, for the most part.

Based on the book "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal," by David France, the film doesn't shed any new light on the scandal that made headlines across the country and resulted in Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law getting kicked upstairs by the Vatican. However, it does do a heart-wrenchingly credible job of conveying the enduring pain of abuse victims whose adult lives were haunted by what happened to them at the hands of men they were taught to trust.

Competently directed by Dan Curtis from a screenplay by Thomas Michael Donnelly, the film focuses at first on the career of Father John Geoghan, whose history of abusing young boys stretched back to 1965. In an early scene, we see the young Geoghan visiting a family in Hingham, Mass., and offering, as he leaves, to "bless the boys," which only pleases their trusting parents.

He goes to the room of young Angelo DeFranco, shown trembling in terror as the priest approaches his bed.

Flash forward to 2000 and Angelo (Daniel Baldwin, in a beautifully simple and carefully nuanced performance) is now a grown man whose marriage and life are strained to the breaking point by what happened to him years ago. He goes to the church to find out what happened to Geoghan and is assured he's been sent to a hospital for psychologically troubled priests.

Shortly after that, his mother tells him Geoghan is still performing Mass.

Geoghan's arrest galvanizes not only DeFranco to come forward, but other victims as well, including those of other priests. Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson) is the crusading, second-rate lawyer who goes up against the church and its Ivy League-educated legal team to win belated justice for the victims.

But anyone who reads newspapers knows how the plot unfolds. What "Our Fathers" does best is to put faces on the victims. When a couple of deli workers make anti-gay remarks to victim Olan Horne (Chris Bauer), he delivers a gritty, no-holds-barred account of the difference between gay sex and being a child raped by a grown man. It's a shattering moment, but only one of many in the film.

The "other side of the story," as it were, is the part that is, perhaps inevitably, left in the shadows. We know what Cardinal Law said publicly, how he said at first he wasn't aware of what had happened, and then his various public apologies that were never enough to make the scandal go away. But we don't know what was in his mind and heart. Was he truly contrite or merely facing the inevitable? Was the scandal the result of the absolute power of the church and the arrogance of some of its leaders? Or did the scandal fester because of ignorance?

While veteran actor Christopher Plummer certainly looks the part of a prince of the church, we never quite see inside the cardinal's mind. True, there are powerful scenes of apparent contrition, including one in which he tearfully offers his resignation to Pope John Paul II in a private meeting, but because the filmmakers only have the public record to go on, they tend to edge toward vilifying Law one moment, then show him seeming to feel real pain the next.

"I believed with all my soul that they could change," Law tells the pope. It's a powerful and convincing scene, but can we believe it? What is the truth? That Law and other church officials were trying for decades to sweep the filth under the rug, or that they truly thought shifting the abusing priests from church to church would somehow put a stop to their pedophilia? Of course, the idea is absurd and the rest of the film gives lie to the very notion. Yet we see Law, in private conversation with Pope John Paul II -- a conversation for which there could be no public record -- weeping over the papal ring and saying he thought the abusers could change.

"How could you know about these men and just move them around?" victim Olan Horne asks in a private meeting with Law.

How, indeed.

There are a couple of other problems with the film, beginning with the idea of casting Danson as Garabedian. Since this all takes place in Boston, you keep waiting for Sam Malone to duck into Cheers on his way to Suffolk Superior Court, and that's not just because Danson's so well known from the old sitcom but because, as likable as he is, he really plays one role no matter what he's in. Sure, he added a patina of irascibility to that role in "Becker," but basically, he plays lightweights really well, which means "Our Fathers" has a big hole in its center.

Another, lesser problem, is a late subplot focusing on Father Dominic Spagnolia (Brian Dennehy), a tough-talking, no-BS priest who isn't afraid to speak out against Law and is one of the first to call for him to resign. Dennehy, of course, is terrific in the role, but the film would have been better off without the side trip into the story of a priest whose past enables him to remind us that raping boys has nothing to do with homosexuality. By the time the film gets to the Father "Spags" story, no one in their right mind would think that men like Geoghan did what they did because they were gay, and the subplot slightly derails the dramatic arc of the film.

There are extraordinary moments of dramatic truth throughout "Our Fathers, " including a cameo appearance by Ellen Burstyn, as the mother of seven victims of sexual abuse by priests. When she tells Garabedian how the church offered to settle with her to shut her up years ago and he asks how much money was involved, she snaps back, "I didn't care about money, these were my kids. " Burstyn all but frosts the screen with icy resolve that the cover-up shall not continue.

E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.

The pedophilia scandal rocking the Catholic Church is an enormous and complex drama, called by many the greatest challenge to the institution since Martin Luther's 16th Century Reformation.

"Our Fathers," David France's superb, exhaustively reported book from last year, combines addictive crime drama, expert psychological analysis and even enlightening forays into arcane ecclesiastical history. His nearly 600-page tome is lengthy, but highly readable, and tells the tale of some dozen errant clerics and more than two dozen victims.

No two-hour movie version could do all that. Nevertheless, "Our Fathers" (7 p.m. Saturday, Showtime) is a gripping, graphic, unflinching and insightful docudrama abridgment. It cuts corners, simplifies and resorts to composites. But it also manages a thorough airing of the deep, disturbing political issues and a chilling, almost unwatchably seedy depiction of the crimes.

As Father Dominic Spagnolia (Brian Dennehy) intones in a sermon at the height of the crisis, the clerical pedophiles were "predators in holy vestments, wolves not sheep."

Liberally rearranging and editing France's epic, the movie's director (Dan Curtis) and writer (Thomas Michael Donnelly) narrow the narrative by focusing heavily (though not exclusively) on the deeds of John Geoghan, the priest convicted of serial molestation and later murdered in prison. Portrayed as a young priest with an especially smarmy, creepy ghoulishness by Damien Atkins, Geoghan comes off as relentless and fearless, not to mention psychologically damaging.

The movie jumps back and forth in time, showing disturbing instances of Geoghan's antics in a child's bedroom in the early '60s and then chronicling the heartbreaking aftereffects of uncontrollable temper, low self-esteem and panic attacks that bedevil one victim, superbly played by Dan Baldwin in adulthood.

Interwoven are the stories of street savvy attorney Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson) and his uphill battle to thwart the church in court, the editorial crusade at The Boston Globe to obtain records sealed to protect the archdiocese and the backstage negotiations and strategies of church officials, including Bernard Francis Law, portrayed with intimidating dignity and a welcome dose of three-dimensional sympathy by veteran Shakespearean Christopher Plummer.

One of the more interesting, potentially controversial scenes involves a session between Law and the now late pontiff John Paul II (Jan Rubes) in 2002. Plummer, as Law, passionately insists his misguided sympathy for the priests stemmed from pastoral earnestness and faith. Swayed, John Paul rejects Law's resignation offer and says, "Holy Mother the Church does not make sacrifices at the altar of public opinion."

Curtis and Donnelly maintain both a clear, fast-moving narrative and an air of understandable indignation, never losing control of a sprawling story that spans decades, involves dozens of characters and often turns on complex legal arguments and paperwork. All the principal players are top-notch, including Dennehy, as a crusading priest and sympathetic character struggling with both church officials and his own sexuality.

Even more memorable are the lesser known actors portraying the victims in adulthood, including Baldwin, Thomas Mitchell, Hugh Thompson, Chris Bauer, Aidan Devine and, especially, James Oliver, who, as Patrick McSorley, embodies the innocence and tragedy characteristic of so many victims.

"Our Fathers" isn't easy viewing, and it deals in disturbing issues of malfeasance and murky morals on the part of powerful people inside and outside the church. Nor will it be the final word in a complicated debate with points on all sides. But it is, at the very least, an impressive, hard-hitting and relevant TV movie.
----------
sismith@tribune.com

About the less-than-perfect Catholic Church, a character in Don DeLillo’s novel Americana once explained: “It’s like the lying and cheating General Motors does. You still need cars.” And it’s not as if American Catholics didn’t know that there was some lying and cheating going on before 2002, when, with considerable help from a local lawyer, the Boston Globe blew the whistle on Father John J. Geoghan and Cardinal Bernard Law. The surprise is that anybody was surprised. The astonishment is that the church was finally held accountable.

And while Our Fathers is a worthy adaptation of David France’s scrupulous book on the pedophilia scandal, it is far from the first television production to address the issues. Not even counting the episode of Law & Order in which Chris Noth’s Mike Logan had to face up to his altar-boy past, I can recall as far back as fifteen years ago both The Boys of St. Vincent, a nightmare mini-series based loosely on a sexual-abuse case in a Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland in the seventies, and Judgment, a TV movie in which David Strathairn played a Louisiana priest who molested young parishioners and Jack Warden played the attorney who actually enjoyed taking on Holy Rome. None of this should have been news.

But it is news in Boston when attorney Mitchell Garabedian (a frantic Ted Danson) goes after not only a priest (Steven Shaw’s Father Geoghan) who abused more than one young boy but also the archdiocese that knew of the abuse yet transferred him anyway to another parish, where he repeated his offenses. When the Globe and its “Spotlight” investigative team get into the act, suddenly the cozy system in which the church has been coddled by pols, cops, and courts falls apart. Cardinal Law—an amazing Christopher Plummer, who plays the Man in Red as if he were a princely cretin—can no longer hide behind deal-making lawyers (Will Lyman) and cover-up bishops (Kenneth Welsh). Priests with a better idea of stewardship (Brian Dennehy), mothers who refuse to forgive and forget (Ellen Burstyn), and victims grown up but still grieving (Chris Bauer, Daniel Baldwin, James Oliver) all line up against him. Only the pope (Jan Rubes) is on his slithery side.

We will sit in on editorial meetings in which a newspaper decides just how brave it can afford to be. We will eavesdrop on the archdiocese as it plots to distract media attention by gay-bashing Dennehy’s Father Spagnolia. We will watch as Father Geoghan, sentenced to prison for ten years, is strangled in his cell. Still, the most powerful moments in Our Fathers belong to the survivors, many of whom have insisted that their real names be used here. Their testimony may be more explicit than any you’ve ever heard on television, but we are, after all, talking about rape. It is precisely such witness that speaks to the ultimate shame, to an official abuse of power more horrific than any failure of accountability. These were children.

Still, despite the show’s strengths, can’t help but compare it to The Boys of St. Vincent, which is scarier because more artful. Instead of hopping about, like Our Fathers, from office to cloister to bar to bedroom, Boys moved in druggy dream-speed, distilling its raw materials to a dark and claustrophobic residue—coercion dressed up as worship. The first two hours were medieval: Obedience had nothing to do with God; power was sickly erotic; despair was the only gravity. The two concluding hours jumped forward to 1990, when the case of damaged boys finally came to Canadian trial. So the modern imagination tried to come to grips with an age-old evil in the distinctively modern manner—with cameras and courtrooms, royal commissions and licensed psychiatrists, even a call-in radio talk show. But the mind fell down like a torn black kite.

Both the little boys in Canada and the holy fathers in Boston make me wonder how much we really need DeLillo’s cars.

Our Fathers
Showtime.
Premieres May 21, 8 P.M.

About the show
Our Fathers
Showtime, Saturday, 8 p.m. ET/PT
* * * 1/2 (out of four)

The worst events bring out the best in some people.

Certainly, few events in recent American history have been more devastating than the Boston abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church. The image of priests as "predators in holy vestments" is a painful one to face, and there are always those who would prefer to turn away.

Luckily, Showtime and the artists behind Our Fathers are not among them. They have produced a powerful movie that confronts the horror of the past without abandoning hope for a better future.

It does not shirk from exposing the sins that were inflicted on young boys by the priests who were supposed to be their spiritual shepherds. But the film's focus is on the brave people who fought back: the victims who raised their voices; the reporters who brought their plight to public attention; and, at the movie's center, the lawyer who drove their case home.

Directed by Dan Curtis, who never allows a trace of salaciousness to enter the film, Our Fathers was adapted by Thomas Michael Donnelly from David France's best seller. In turning the book into a film, Curtis and Donnelly have centered the story on the two stars who play the prime antagonists: Ted Danson as lawyer Mitchell Garabedian and Christopher Plummer as Cardinal Bernard Law.

For Our Fathers, Garabedian clearly is the hero, and Law, who is painted as allowing the abuse to continue for decades, is just as clearly the villain. But neither is a cartoon, and the actors use their considerable skills to endow each with a full range of emotions and qualities. Indeed, while you root for Garabedian, Plummer does create some small pocket of sympathy for Law — which, given the news coverage of the Boston scandal, can't have been easy.

Curtis sets the tone of the film from the start in a flashback that conveys a boy's trauma and humiliation without showing anything explicit. We see the fear in the children's eyes, but we find out about the events themselves from the now-adult victims in a series of confessions and confrontations.

The most moving — and most graphic — comes from Chris Bauer as Olan Horne, who silences two fools who mock him by telling them exactly what happened to him when he was 11.

The story is set in motion, however, by another victim: Angelo DeFranco (Daniel Baldwin). Promised that the priest who abused him was sent away to a hospital, never to return, Angelo is enraged to learn that the man was serving at a local parish — and has been arrested for abuse. And so he goes to Garabedian in search of both redemption and revenge.

What unfolds is, in a sense, a non-secular version of All the President's Men. Confronted by an entrenched, stonewalling church, Garabedian uses the courts and the press to force a decades-long story of abuse into the open — and in the end to force the church to cleanse itself.

Given strong material, a fine cast responds with strong performances. In addition to Danson, Plummer, Bauer and Baldwin, there is standout work from Ellen Burstyn as an understandably bitter mother, James Oliver as the most fragile of the victims, and Brian Dennehy as a priest with a different sort of secret.

As it proceeds, Fathers does sometimes lose track of its emotional core, particularly near the end, as more victims and more cases arise. Still, many may see a somewhat filtered focus as a fair trade for a more complete picture.

No, it isn't always a pretty picture, but it's not as grim a picture as you might expect, either. There are heroes here, and that is a blessing no one can deny.

Retirement works wonders. When Cardinal Bernard F. Law led a memorial mass for Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Basilica last month, it was as if his long tenure as archbishop of Boston had been unblemished, his resignation under pressure in 2002 forgotten.

Even the cardinal seemed to have banished unpleasant memories. When the ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos veered from the topic of John Paul II's legacy to ask the former archbishop if he thought he could have done more to address the problem of pedophile priests, Cardinal Law looked as if he had been slapped. "You know, I, I don't know that this is a time to be reflecting on that issue," the cardinal replied stiffly, before adding that of course he deplored his and others' failures.

John Paul II's death and the election of Pope Benedict XVI helped divert public attention from the issue, which only three years ago dominated newspapers and Sunday sermons. "Our Fathers," a Showtime movie tomorrow about the uncovering of the sexual abuse in the Boston Diocese, is a jarring reminder of the crimes that were covered up or excused for generations.

The film, based on David France's book "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal" (Broadway Books, 2004), turns the spotlight back to Boston and the shattered lives of Catholic children. The film's scrutiny is relentless, but respectful and not without mercy: "Our Fathers" is not a horror story about monsters in clerical collars, but a horrifying story of sick priests and their innocent victims.

The film takes a hard look at the many authorities who looked the other way, and the few who sought to redress the wrongs. Yet even Cardinal Law, played by Christopher Plummer, gets a fair hearing.

And, for a moment, so does Father John J. Geoghan, the Boston priest whose arrest on sexual molestation charges opened the door on the scandal and who was strangled in his prison cell in 2003. The film begins in 1962 with the ordination of Geoghan, one of a score of young men in white vestments lying face down on the floor of the church in a pious ritual of humility. (That alone is a sight that today's Roman Catholics rarely see: vocations have fallen off so sharply over the last 40 years that some North American parishes never witness even one ordination.)

When his name is called, young Geoghan looks up at the bishop before him with tears of fear and shame swimming in his eyes. Within five years, however, young Father John is a charming dinner guest of grateful parishioners, who thank him for blessing their sons sleeping upstairs - only the boys he preyed upon were not asleep, and he was not in their bedrooms to pray.

And those memories of childhood molestation, tightly repressed by day but resurfacing in dreams at night, are what drove Angelo DeFranco (Daniel Baldwin) to drive his fist through his bathroom mirror, and eventually to seek retribution. He and a personal-injury lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson), battle to make the church records and sex abuse public.

It was Angelo who led Mitchell to Mary Ryan (Ellen Burstyn), a mother of seven boys who all claimed to have been abused by Father Geoghan. Asked by church officials to keep quiet about the abuse, she sent an irate, registered letter to her archbishop - the first tangible piece of evidence that Cardinal Law had firsthand knowledge of the accusations as early as 1984.

Made-for-television movies usually trim the messy details of real life into a smooth narrative arc; "Our Fathers" does not delve into every topic covered in Mr. France's 600-page tome, but it does try to include significant side stories. Geoghan was not by any means the only predator priest - the Massachusetts attorney general released a report that said as many as 250 priests and other church workers in the Boston Archdiocese had sexually abused many hundreds of children, perhaps more than 1,000, since 1940.

"Our Fathers" also focuses on the victims of the Rev. Joseph Birmingham, who preyed on minors from the 1970's through the 1980's. Not all victims are alike: Angelo fixates on publicly confronting and shaming Cardinal Law; Olan Horne (Chris Bauer) wants the archbishop to understand - he talks his way into the archbishop's residence and tries to explain his sense of betrayal. Most of the time, Cardinal Law appears dodderingly confused or regally distant. In that encounter, he regains his humanity. "Don't turn away from Christ," he implores Olan. "He didn't fail you. I failed you."

Mr. Plummer is persuasive in the role, but other stars are less convincing. Mr. Danson is a little too buttoned-down and courtly to pass as a shabby Boston lawyer with a chip on his shoulder about snooty bishops and their Harvard-educated legal advisers. Brian Dennehy brings his usual bluff charm, but not much nuance, to the role of the Rev. Dominic Spagnolia, a priest who boldly condemned the cover-up from his own pulpit but was later forced out when a past homosexual liaison became public. The Boston Globe reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for their coverage of the scandal are minor figures here. Mostly, it is the victims who are vividly and subtly portrayed, in particular by Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Bauer.

John Paul II (Jan Rubes) has a cameo during a private audience with Cardinal Law in the Vatican. (It is not clear how the screenwriters were able to recreate the late pope's private tête-à-tête, as Cardinal Law is not exactly known for his eagerness to expose church secrets.) In the scene, the pontiff is appalled by abuse but unmoved by pressure in the United States to remove the cardinal. When Cardinal Law tearfully offers to resign, the pope refuses, saying, "Holy Mother Church does not make sacrifices at the altar of public opinion."

Cardinal Law, nevertheless, resigned at the end of 2002. In May 2004 Pope John Paul II called him to Rome to head the Basilica of St. Mary Major. Retirement does work wonders.

Our Fathers

Showtime, tomorrow night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time

Directed by Dan Curtis; screenplay by Thomas Michael Donnelly, based on a book by David France; Mr. Curtis, David Kennedy, Gary Howsam and Charles Bloye, executive producers; John J. McMahon, producer; Eric Van Haren Noman, director of photography; Lindsey Hermer-Bell, production designer; edited by Henk Van Eeghen; music composed and conducted by Bob Cobert; casting by Molly Lopata, Susan Forrest, Sharon Forrest and Pat McCorkle. Presented by Showtime in association with Peace Arch Entertainment Group. A Dan Curtis production.

WITH: Ted Danson (Mitchell Garabedian), Christopher Plummer (Cardinal Law), Brian Dennehy (Father Spagnolia), Daniel Baldwin (Angelo DeFranco), Ellen Burstyn (Mary Ryan), Steven Shaw (Father Geoghan), Chris Bauer (Olan Horne) and Jan Rubes (Pope John Paul II).

[Photo: The TV movie "Our Fathers" features, from left, Brian Dennehy, Christopher Plummer and Ted Danson.]

"Our Fathers," Showtime's quietly lacerating movie about the Roman Catholic Church's child-abuse scandal, kicks closure to the curb.

"This is a saga with no real ending," said director and executive producer Dan Curtis. "To present it as otherwise would belie the lives of thousands of men." Amen. There are stories that need to be told not because they're new, but because they've failed to become old.

The film, airing at 8 tomorrow night, is impressively even-toned. Taut direction, cogent writing and a fine ensemble led by Ted Danson, Christopher Plummer, Brian Dennehy and Daniel Baldwin convey a message that is not screamed in outrage, but rendered in hushed tones shaped to the sickening content.

The effect is a series of deceptively soft blows to the solar plexus.

By pulling together familiar facts — the cover-up of priests that molested children, the church's callous indifference for decades, the trials and bankrupting settlements that spread across the nation — "Our Fathers" presents a powerful institution riddled with sickness and denial.

The film transcends news accounts by giving voice to the victims, most from working-class or poor families. It is adapted from David France's book, "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal," and opens with several vignettes.

We see a class of seminarians graduating in 1962. Among them is John J. Geoghan.

Flash forward to 1967. Geoghan is playing cards at the home of the working-class DeFranco family. As he prepares to leave, Geoghan suddenly says, "I forgot to bless the boys." He goes upstairs, and we see the DeFranco boys cowering in their beds.

The horror that unfolds, now and later in the film, is graphically told in the faces of the actors rather than through any explicit depiction. It is all the more powerful for that.

And the timeless, nightmarish quality is underscored when the story moves to the present. A grown-up Angelo DeFranco (Baldwin) suffers from horrible dreams.

He tells his bishop what happened to him and his brother 33 years earlier, and asks that Geoghan not be allowed near kids. He is given assurances — worthless, as it turns out.

By 2002, complaints about Geoghan had reached a Boston lawyer named Mitchell Garabedian. DeFranco soon will join them, followed by others as word spread.

Their cases eventually would rock the Catholic church in America and lead to the resignation of Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, played here by Plummer.

As Garabedian, the ambulance-chaser who took on the Archdiocese of Boston, Ted Danson reveals several layers beneath his old sitcom persona. The cockiness has been banished to the fringes; what's central is a riveting authority. He's never been better.

Also superb is Plummer. No actor is so adept at projecting an aristocratic demeanor that conceals crumbling emotion. He give Cardinal Law humanity without letting him off the hook, and it is up to the audience to decide why Law acted as he did in hiding priests.

"Our Fathers" also resists the cliché of the heroic press or single-handed crusader.

While it credits the Boston Globe investigative series that helped bring down Law and won a Pulitzer, the film also contains a scene reminding us that Garabedian deliberately laid down a trail of documents for the press to find. He was frustrated at how long it took.

Garabedian's sheer audaciousness — the refusal to be bullied by politics or tradition — was impressive. So was his legal acumen.

Yet "Our Fathers" ultimately is about those who came forward to tell their individual tales of shame and in some cases, ruin. They did their own research, providing names that led to dozens of cases of abuse and delivering it all to Garabedian's doorstep.

This was no easy task. The men we meet are from backgrounds framed by rigid conventions of religion, class and sexual identity.

In one of the film's most heartrending scenes, Olan Horne (Chris Bauer) actually gains access to Law and confronts him.

Horne shows Law pictures of himself as an altar boy with the cardinal, then his own little boy. "I don't trust you guys to baptize my kid," he says, tears rolling down his face. "This is my life, Bernie. You should have known. You should have looked out for us."

About the only awkward note that "Our Fathers" strikes is a side story about Father Dominic Spagnolia (Dennehy), a priest who dared express his outrage at Law from the pulpit and subsequently was pulled into a scandal involving a male lover.

I understood the point the film was trying to make — that the Catholic church purposely blurred the distinctions between homosexuality and pedophilia to pin the scandal to "aberrant" priests. But Spagnolia's story is not well-integrated.

Far more successful and chilling is a subplot about the strings pulled to get Law safely removed to a higher position in Rome after resigning. The outrage over that appointment was drowned in post-death eulogies for the man who did it, Pope John Paul II.

"Our Fathers" ends with a factual summary of what happened to the main characters. But its main point is that nothing has ended. Corrupt institutions take a long time to change; the Catholic Church has barely gotten past denial.

Kay McFadden: kmcfadden@seattletimes.com

(Movie; Showtime, Sat. May 21, 8 p.m.)

Filmed in Toronto by Dan Curtis Prods. and Peace Arch Entertainment. Executive producers, Gary Howsam, Charles Bloye, Dan Curtis, David Kennedy; co-executive producers, Thomas Michael Donnelly, David France; producer, John J. McMahon; co-producer, Barbara Steele; director, Curtis; writer, Donnelly, based on the book by France.

Mitchell Garabedian - Ted Danson Cardinal Bernard Law - Christopher Plummer Father Dominic Spagnolia - Brian Dennehy Angelo DeFranco - Daniel Baldwin Mary Ryan - Ellen Burstyn Bishop Murphy - Kenneth Welsh Wilson Rogers Jr. - Will Lyman

Ambitious, meticulously made but ultimately refracted through too many characters, Showtime's exploration of how the Catholic Church mishandled the issue of pedophile priests is surely provocative but less than wholly satisfying. Perhaps that's because there are three or four movies here, and the distillation of David France's book yields elements of each without fully developing any of them. First-rate performances and compelling subject matter still make for a watchable yarn, but "Our Fathers" seems unlikely to bestow the kind of creative valediction the pay service covets. Director Dan Curtis and writer Thomas Michael Donnelly exhibit admirable restraint in conveying the depth of the predatory clergy scandal that stunned Boston, capturing victims' lingering pain without depicting it graphically. In several flashbacks, grown men with haunted visages recall horrifying moments from their youth when a seemingly friendly priest got them alone, secure that no one would believe their claims even if they dared utter them.

The movie incorporates some of those survivor-of-abuse tales, as embodied by Daniel BaldwinDaniel Baldwin and "The Wire's" Chris Bauer, yet they are but part of the story. At the ostensible core is Ted Danson as attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represents a lawsuit against the church and Cardinal Bernard Law (Christopher Plummer), who shuttled the offending priests from parish to parish, allowing them to victimize other children.

"Law knew but did nothing. It's huge," notes a Boston Globe reporter.

The Globe, too, is a minor player by virtue of its initial reluctance to take on the church, as is the ever-brilliant Brian Dennehy in a knockout perfperf as an outspoken priest who uses the pulpit to denounce Law's leadership. "Predators in holy vestments. Wolves, not shepherds!" he thunders.

Even then, though, other stories are exposed but barely explored. Short shrift is given to the military priest who figures prominently in Garabedian's case, the irate mother (Ellen Burstyn) whose sons were molested and internal church politics -- extending all the way to the rationale of Pope John Paul II (played by Jan Rubes, the Amish patriarch in "Witness") in allowing Law to continue.

In short, it's the kind of movie that ends with a lengthy scroll about what ultimately happened to various characters because there's nothing else really to tie all its threads together. As such, the movie bogs down a bit in its last third, despite the fine work by a solid cast.

Although it's understandable why the filmmakers would want to provide a sense of the scandal's breadth, greater focus would have surely helped -- whethery by zeroing in on the lawyers, the church, the newspaper or the victims.

As it is, power still resonates from this disturbing story and the political sensitivities that make a pay channel uniquely qualified to relate it. Yet in doing so from every conceivable angle, "Our Fathers" reveals that when it comes to exposing a painful truth, there's not always strength in numbers.

Camera, Eric van Haren Noman; production design, Lindsey Hermer-Bell; editor, Henk van Eeghen; music, Bob Cobert; casting, Molly Lopata, Susan Forrest, Sharon Forrest, Pat McCorkle. 129 MIN.

Variety is striving to present the most thorough review database. To report inaccuracies in review credits, please click here. We do not currently list below-the-line credits, although we hope to include them in the future. Please note we may not respond to every suggestion. Your assistance is appreciated.

Date in print: Fri., May 20, 2005, Los Angeles

BOOKS
OUR FATHERS
The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
By DAVID FRANCE
Broadway Books
$16.95, 656 pages

OUR FATHERS
A Showtime original film
Directed by Dan Curtis
Premieres May 21 8 p.m.

“My work is always about when an institution is challenged, when philosophies and ideas clash,” explained journalist and author David France during a breakfast interview earlier this week at an East Village coffee shop near his home.

That perspective offers one rubric for describing the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the American Roman Catholic Church over the past five years, but it merely hints at the scope of that tragedy inflicted upon thousands of victims or at the vitality and dedication that France brought to reporting the story in “Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal.” (Random House, 2004)

The book has become the basis of a Showtime original film premiering this Saturday that stars Ted Danson, Christopher Plummer, Brian Dennehy and Ellen Burstyn.

In two hours and 10 minutes, the film captures some of the greatest strengths of France’s nearly 600-page narrative—its heartrending drama and its commitment to tell a complex, rather than simple story. Cardinal Bernard Law, Boston’s former archbishop, whose haughtiness and then despair is played by Plummer, is a remote autocrat shockingly aloof to the suffering of his flock and to the damage wrought by his overlooking of crimes. Law is forced to sit face-to-face with enraged working-class men who were victimized as children who refuse to address him as “father” never mind “your eminence.”

“Call me Bernie,” Law says at one point.

The film, directed by Dan Curtis with a screenplay—written essentially contemporaneously with France’s book—by Thomas Michael Donnelly, also offers brilliant vignettes about some of the victims, their families and the burdens they carried for years after their abuse. Burstyn commands the screen in her scenes as a mother who learns years after the fact that every one of her seven sons had been molested by Father John Geoghan, a priest convicted of groping a young boy’s buttocks and sentenced to ten years in prison, where he was murdered in August 2003.

The film’s most stunning moment, though, belongs to actor Chris Bauer, who plays Olan Horne. As a 12-year-old victim of repeated rape in his home, Horne unwittingly turned to a pedophile, Father Thomas Birmingham, for counsel. Unfortunately, Birmingham may have been the most prolific abuser in the entire story—among his victims it is believed that he molested more than 300 boys.

Horne grew up to be a butcher and after he became known as a public accuser of Birmingham, who was by then dead, a co-worker one day teased him in front of a crowd of customers, saying, “Olan, you must be good at these,” pointing to a phallic-shaped pork tenderloin. The former victim exploded: “Let me explain something to you. You’re grabbing an 11-year-old kid. You pull him to the floor. You grab him by the back of the head and you take your cock, and you stick it down his fucking throat. Got him by the back of the head doing it. Kid’s fucking having a panic attack. And then this guy puts me on the floor with his knee in my back, you know, the guy’s ejaculating all over my back, he’s beating the shit out of me because I’m trying to get away, but I’m like, still, ‘Fuck you!’ That’s a blowjob? Hell no, that ain’t no blow job. That’s rape. You need me to fill you in on any other sexual points? You want to hear some more? You tough enough? Because I can go places you’ve never been.”

Despite repeated complaints lodged against Birmingham with the Boston archdiocese, he continued to be re-assigned, and when he died, possibly from AIDS and shortly after being visited by an anguished man who had been one of his youthful victims, Law presided over his funeral mass and offered a poetic eulogy.

The film’s ending is haunted by the plight of Patrick McSorley, played by James Oliver, who was once groped by Geoghan when he was 12 and was unable to ever get his life on track. Text scrolling on the screen explained that he died of a drug overdose after his claims against the Archdiocese of Boston were settled. France said that he essentially used the settlement money to commit suicide and noted that according to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), approximately 140 suicides can be ascribed to the scandal.

Showtime’s film lays out a variety of key narrative arcs from the book—and it adds up to a dramatic tour de force. But the enormity of the story best comes through in France’s book itself, in which nothing less than a nearly 50-year history of the darkest corners of life in the Catholic Church is painstakingly chronicled, in a fashion consciously modeled on the style Randy Shilts used to report the unfolding AIDS crisis in “And the Band Played On.”

Unlike the film, which focuses nearly all its attention on the crisis in Boston, the book makes clear that the problem was nationwide, first erupting in public view on a large scale in Louisiana in the mid-1980s. In fact, the high-level attention within church councils that the abuse of children by priests received at that time makes the negligence of Law and so many of his peers around the nation that much harder to comprehend.

According to France, Boston was not even the worst of it. He mentioned Tucson, Arizona, and New Mexico, where several treatment facilities for abusive priests were located and where those on the rebound from such treatment were often fobbed off on understaffed local parishes; and Lexington, Kentucky, which has the dubious distinction of having the highest ratio of abuse complaints to practicing Catholics.

In one unforgettable chapter, Cardinal Roger Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, is consecrating a new, $193-million cathedral—even as he cries poor from abuse victim settlements and is slashing pastoral programs—with a Mass dedicated to those victims, but populated by major donors separated by chain-link fence from the crowds of protesters demanding tougher action on the sex scandal. Law is among the attendees.

“They were using the issue as a fund-raising tool,” France caustically observed this week.

France does a superb job of capturing the crisis of faith within the American church caused by the abuse revelations. The impact is measured not only in falling weekly attendance at Mass and declining contributions, but also in the waves of people who became radicalized church activists. The 4,500 members of SNAP, according to France, “are still in the trenches, fighting out everywhere” against a hierarchy that “still sees them as the enemy.”

There were numerous other groups spawned by the crisis, one of the most prominent of which is Voice of the Faithful, begun in Boston, as a way to convey to church leaders the urgency of the concerns felt by ordinary Catholics horrified by what their church had come to symbolize. In France’s view, this group became “neutered” by the word “faithful” in their name, forced to toe the line by the bishops on questions of doctrinal orthodoxy, yet still never granted full legitimacy. Like the gay Catholic group Dignity, Voices of the Faithful is now largely banned from using church property, yet also viewed with suspicion by SNAP, though a scene in which the two groups spontaneously come together for a march on Boston’s Holy Name Cathedral is stirring.

France, 46, was not raised as a Catholic and graduated from Kalamazoo College, which has a Baptist affiliation. As a reporter, he does a good job at taking the Catholic Church on its own terms. Though he clearly views the scandal as an outgrowth of the church’s troubled theology on human sexuality, and juxtaposes certain discussions to quite effectively illuminate that, there are no easy shots taken here.

In fact, France, a gay writer, candidly acknowledges that many of the abusers he writes about were gay men, and people so deeply damaged by their religious training, and perhaps even their own childhood abuse, that they represented nearly perfect examples of “repression,” a psychosexual state that by its very nature is nearly impossible to study.

France explained that his willingness to explore some of the subjects in his book through the lens of repressed homosexuality has given him problems—not only while he was at Newsweek, where he said there was an “open struggle” about his perspective, but also in his snubbing by a panel of the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association convened to discuss the sex scandal, to which he was not invited even though his ongoing work on the book had already received recognition.

According to France, the laudable goal of emphasizing that child abuse is not inherently linked to homosexuality or to open gay life has been reduced to a “p.c.” rejection of what he says is the undeniable fact that many of the monsters in his book “are those we left behind.”

France is even willing to express what has been almost completely absent from any discussion of the church scandal—compassion for the perpetrators.

In March 2002, just a month after the sex scandal broke wide open in Boston, France was invited to visit Neil Conway, a defrocked priest from a wealthy Cleveland family who admitted to molesting eight boys. Sixteen years after leaving the priesthood, Conway was living “in filthy self-denigration” as a hermit on secluded farmland. Tormented by his crimes, he had nonetheless made amends to each of his victims, was in recovery from alcoholism and said he accepted his homosexuality. Explaining to France that he wanted neither pity nor absolution, Conway tries to explain himself: “There’s a famous Tosca aria where she’s trapped and she goes, ‘God, you know my life is art, my trade is art and love.’ I want to say: I was ordained a priest as a young man who was still a young boy—fourteen years old—emotionally and sexually. And I learned how to get what I thought I needed in the priesthood, doing what a priest does. Tosca says, ‘Look what has happened to me! I was so in love with my life, and at the same time I was in trouble right away, as soon as I stepped off the box’… I lived in two worlds.”

After his encounter with Conway, France decided to write his book. He cries, he said, every time he reads that passage.

Bottom line: A faithful and fair rendition of an unprecedented crisis in faith.

The revelation of widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church raises too many disturbing questions and presents too many serious issues for any film, or even a miniseries, to thoroughly explore. And while there is widespread agreement that this abuse by trusted and admired religious leaders was despicable, opinions differ on why it happened, what should be done about it and how the victims should be compensated. Even the victims don't all agree on answers to these questions.

In trying to get a filmic handle on the situation, Showtime based "Our Fathers" on a meticulously researched account of how the scandal unraveled in Boston, as told in David France's best-seller "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal." France worked alongside teleplay writer Thomas Michael Donnelly, passing along documents and interviews as the book was being written. Perhaps, as a result, "Our Fathers" sacrifices Hollywood dramatic polish in favor of a factually pristine presentation of events and personalities.

This is, among other things, a classic David-vs.-Goliath story as well as a tale of an insidious bureaucracy as corrupt as the greediest energy manipulators or defense subcontractors. Actually, worse, because it robbed its victims of their faith and souls. But rather than speechify about this grand evil, Donnelly lets it unfold bit by bit, giving us perspectives from a growing number of victims as well as church leaders, who quickly circle the wagons and go into cover-up mode.

Ted Danson stars as Mitchell Garabedian, a previously unheralded lawyer whose legal maneuvering and investigation revealed the tip of an unimaginable iceberg of pedophilia. Christopher Plummer plays Cardinal Bernard Law, who, in the interest of avoiding bad publicity, allows deviant priests to prey on youngsters for nearly two decades. Brian Dennehy plays Father Spagnolia, whose outspoken outrage over the church's handling of the matter earns him the enmity of Cardinal Law and eventual payback.

The strength of the film is its portrayal of these men, as well as the victims of parish priests, as regular folk, neither heroes nor monsters. Garabedian wants a spotlight on the injustice but no more than he wants a monetary settlement. Law didn't intend to hurt parishioners, only to cover up potentially messy situations. He sees himself as a martyr for the sins of others. Some victims, living with anguish, their faith crushed, don't even know what they want. Money, apologies -- nothing seems to help.

Credit director Dan Curtis for scrupulously avoiding sensationalism and for assembling a cast that digs to find the humanity in each character. Whether it's a local bar or the cardinal's posh estate, Curtis finds a way to get to the heart and the truth of each scene.

One can argue that, at nearly two hours and 10 minutes, "Our Fathers" might have benefited from a few more judicious trims. Nonetheless, this film makes this sad story resonate in ways no newspaper or newscast ever can.

OUR FATHERS
Showtime
Showtime in association with Peace Arch Entertainment Group
Credits:
Executive producers: Dan Curtis, David Kennedy, Gary Howsam, Charles Bloye
Co-executive producers: Thomas Michael Donnelly, David France
Producer: John J. McMahon
Co-producer: Barbara Steele
Director: Dan Curtis
Teleplay: Thomas Michael Donnelly
Based on the book by: David France
Director of photography: Eric Van Haren Noman
Production designer: Lindsey Hermer-Bell
Editor: Henk Van Eeghen
Music: Bob Cobert
Set decorator: David Edgar
Casting: Molly Lopata, Susan Forrest, Sharon Forrest, Pat McCorkle
Cast:
Mitchell Garabedian: Ted Danson
Cardinal Bernard Law: Christopher Plummer
Father Dominic Spagnolia: Brian Dennehy
Angelo DeFranco: Daniel Baldwin
Mary Ryan: Ellen Burstyn
Bishop Murphy: Kenneth Welsh
Wilson Rogers Jr.: Will Lyman
Father Doyle: Wayne Best
Daniel Kibbe: Colin Fox
Patrick McSorley: James Oliver

The scandalous epidemic of priests sexually molesting children that came to light in Boston in 2002 may seem like old news to a public that has moved on to other headlines such as Michael Jackson's trial. But the subject always will be raw for the survivors violated by such trusted figures, the relatives who cope with their emotional baggage, and the teachers and bosses of those survivors who cannot earn their trust.

Showtime's dramatization of the most notorious cases, "Our Fathers," debuts Saturday as recent headlines serve as reminders of the scope of the problem. Last week, a videotaped deposition by former Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady surfaced, showing him describing his seduction technique that led to multiple assaults on young children in Stockton while Cardinal Roger Mahony was the bishop there. And voluminous files released this week related to the $100 million settlement between the Orange Diocese and 90 plaintiffs shows bishops there also covered up for and transferred known pedophile priests for more than two decades.

David France, who led Newsweek's coverage of the Boston scandal, says there are nine criminal cases pending involving priests and more than 400 lawsuits against some 120 priests here in the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

"It's huge," says France, author of "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal." "How Mahony has gotten so far without taking a single bullet for this is amazing."

While France's book goes into graphic detail about the known offenses of former priests John Geoghan, Joseph Birmingham, Paul Shanley and others, it places the stories in the wider context of the Roman Catholic Church, its establishment of priestly celibacy in the Middle Ages and its discussions of sex and reproduction in the Vatican II conference of the 1960s. It also sheds light on an institutional mind set of denial and cover-up that makes Watergate look like harmless whispering.

The film only alludes to the molestations themselves, focusing instead on the aftermath: the mothers torn by love for their children and their church, the systematic shuffling of offenders from one parish to another, the complaints swept under the rug with small settlements and confidentiality agreements and, decades later, the emotional wreckage of men who recall being assaulted even as they and their spiritual leaders prayed together. It also shows the church's apparent lack of concern for the welfare of the young victims.

Why it happened on such a large scale in that time and place remains a puzzle. According to France, the number of pedophile priests is usually about half the 3 to 4 percent of the world population who have pedophile tendencies. But there was something extraordinary about the young men emerging from Catholic seminaries between 1960 and the early '70s.

"For this generation, there's a huge bell-curve leap. The class of 1960 had a 12 percent offense rate in the archdiocese in Boston, similar across the country. That's more than one in 10 ordained priests who, through the course of their adulthood, would draw credible allegations of sexual abuse from children. That's huge."

Brian Dennehy plays one of those 1960 graduates, the Rev. Dominic Spagnolia, who at his own peril was an outspoken critic of the church's handling of the scandal. Dennehy, who was raised Catholic, calls priest pedophilia "the crime that keeps on giving."

"It's not just the kids. It's their families, their brothers and sisters, their uncles, their aunts, their wives or husbands, their children. Generation after generation, person after person, it's a terrible, terrible devastating crime."

Ted Danson plays attorney Mitchell Garabedian, an ordinary civil litigator who uncovered documents confirming the archdiocese's cover-up and ultimately won $10 million for 86 plaintiffs.

"I really felt like I wanted to be part of this story, not so much, oh, I'm dying to play this character," Danson said. "I want to be part of this story because I think it is an important story.

"I loved the idea that there was a question for some people - is (Garabedian) an ambulance chaser or not? I like that slight rough edge, that he's not a saint, that he kind of stumbled into doing something really powerful."

Danson said his mother, for many years a Roman Catholic, was concerned about her son's involvement in the film until he explained the good he believes it could do.

"It's obvious, but as long as you have secrets, there's no room for healing," he said.

Cardinal Bernard Law, played by Christopher Plummer, is a focal point of both France's book and the movie, even though he refused to be interviewed for the project. His dialogue is reconstructed from other witnesses' accounts.

Danson said he respects France's book and Thomas Michael Donnelly's script, written practically simultaneously, for presenting with balance what could have been a one-sided account.

"They really did seem to address it evenly," he said. "(Plummer) brought such human dignity ... to Cardinal Law, and that is so important, because you don't want to be able to dismiss this as a one-off, or this is just one man, or this is just isolated."

Olan Horne knows firsthand of the scope of the damage. As a boy in Lowell, Mass., he was sexually abused by someone he describes only as a person close to his family, and when he revealed that dark secret to his parish priest, Joseph Birmingham, he too assaulted the young Horne.

A few years before the Boston Globe broke the scandal open, Horne and some boyhood friends followed Birmingham's path through eight parishes and uncovered scores of victims. Now 45, Horne works for the University of Massachusetts, consults in mediation of other victims' settlements, and recently started the nonprofit Opportunities Project to aid victims of childhood sexual abuse.

It was Horne, played by Chris Bauer, who is shown confronting the cardinal - whom he calls Bernie - about his habit of isolating or relocating offenders or sending them for counseling rather than notifying the police.

"Years ago, I used to drive down the street, and I'd see a guy losing his cool and grabbing a guy out of a car at a red light because he honked at him, and I used to say, 'That guy's an (expletive),' " Horne said. "Now I say, 'What happened to him?' "

Horne met personally with Robert Greenblatt, Showtime's president of entertainment, to receive his assurance the movie would raise issues important to Horne and the other victims of Birmingham depicted in it.

"I said, 'Listen, I want you to understand how fickle we are about getting behind this, because it's got to be the right film, it's got to have the right message, and if not, we're moving on,' " Horne said. "They treated us with respect and dignity, and I thank them for that."

Horne said he encourages everyone he talks to to see "Our Fathers" multiple times.

"And close your eyes once. Don't look at the characters - listen to them.

"I like it more and more every time I watch it," Horne said. "But sometimes I look at that kid named Olan Horne and it breaks my heart."

OUR FATHERS
What: Movie adapted from David France's journalistic account of the Boston pedophile priests' cases.
Where: Showtime.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
---
Valerie Kuklenski, (818) 713-3750 valerie.kuklenski@dailynews.com

[Photo: Brian Dennehy as Father Spagnolia, Christopher Plummer as "Cardinal Law", and Ted Danson as "Mitchell Garabedian.]

The big names — Christopher Plummer, Brian Dennehy, Ted Danson, Ellen Burstyn — all are that distinguish this Showtime "original drama" about the Church sexual-abuse scandal from the made-for-TV-movies that used to be a network staple. Danson is in genial, wisecracking Sam Malone mode as attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who with the help of his plucky secretary (Kathleen Laskey) takes on the Harvard/Yale Law big shots and wins a $10 million settlement for his victimized clients. (How much he took for himself is not disclosed.) Plummer, looking like an actor who could play Macbeth (as he has), is an improbably conflicted and naive Bernard Cardinal Law, and Showtime abjures any suggestion that he might have been following orders. (Jan Rubes appears in one scene as an improbably doddering John Paul II.) Dennehy plays Lowell priest Dominic Spagnolia, who fulminates against Cardinal Law from his pulpit before (trumped-up?) accusations of sexual molestation are made and a former gay lover comes forth, whereupon the film turns Father Spags into a tearful poster boy for priests who are homosexual but not perverts. The owner of a powerful face that can be impassive and oblique when he chooses, Dennehy might have been a better choice for Cardinal Law. Burstyn has just one scenery-chewing scene as the mother of seven boys all victimized by John J. Geoghan; local favorite Will Lyman is grimly effective as Church attorney Wilson Rogers Jr. The Boston Globe is depicted as the crusading newspaper that took on the Church and broke the story; there’s no mention of Kristen Lombardi’s articles in the Phoenix the year before, but Showtime does throw in leggy Leah Pinsent as Marge Magnus, a fictional Globe reporter who catches Garabedian’s eye. Plus the requisite end titles telling us that victim Patrick McSorley took a drug overdose and Cardinal Law was made archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. (No word on Mitch and Marge, however.) The film was based on Newsweek reporter David France’s book, and it reads like an illustration of its source rather than an "original drama," with grayish villains but lily-white heroes. (129 minutes) Debuts this Saturday, May 21, at 8 p.m. on Showtime.

In his more than 50-year career, Christopher Plummer has played his share of real people.

The Canadian actor essayed ``60 Minutes'' reporter Mike Wallace in the Oscar-nominated film ``The Insider,'' and most people still know him best as Capt. Von Trapp from ``The Sound of Music.''

Plummer now tackles the complicated task of portraying Bernard Cardinal Law in ``Our Fathers,'' Showtime's thoughtful film about the priest sex abuse scandal in Boston (Saturday at 8 p.m.).

In town recently for a screening of the film for a group of abuse survivors, Plummer said he was attracted to the tough and tragic story.

``I love playing difficult roles, and I have all my life,'' the distinguished 77-year-old actor said. ``It always fascinates me to do real people.''

He didn't do much research on the former Hub religious leader, but what he did discover he found oddly oblique.

``Strangely enough, there's nothing to hold on to except the possibility that he strongly believed that he was actually protecting the church. So you find one human thing in him and then latch onto that and try to put it in the performance.''

Plummer said meeting with the victims - some of whom consulted on the film -was tough, but he was impressed with their resilience and their ability to separate the actor from the role.

``They were terrific people and unbelievably brave, but for me it was tough because of course I was the dark horse.''

Of Law's part in the shuffling of abusive priests to different parishes and the decadeslong cover-up, Plummer said, ``I don't dare judge, but I certainly do not sympathize.''

He hopes the film will serve as a type of witness to the tragedy.

``I think it's terribly important in this day and age, and the one thing the media can do, is to expose covert behavior in every profession, no matter what it is.''

If your heart hasn't already been broken by the priest sex abuse scandal, then Showtime's strong film ``Our Fathers'' will finish the job.

Based on Newsweek editor David France's book ``Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal,'' the two-hour film, airing Saturday at 8 p.m., tells the now well-known story of the cover-up of predatory Catholic priests shuffled from parish to parish in the Boston diocese, leaving scores of damaged children in their wake.

Any tragedy is tough to turn into ``entertainment,'' but this one is particularly difficult - especially for local viewers.

Fortunately, director Dan Curtis and a strong cast manage to avoid playing this as a seedy, exploitative movie of the week. (Curtis did similarly sober work during the Holocaust portion of his miniseries ``War and Remembrance.'')

Much as the Hub-centered ``A Civil Action'' did, ``Our Fathers'' uses as its entry point a lawyer who fought on behalf of the victims, in this case, Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson). (Unlike ``Action,'' the Showtime film was shot in Canada.)

It then weaves in the voices of the victims, an outraged priest (Brian Dennehy) and Cardinal Law (Christopher Plummer).

Danson and Dennehy do typically solid work in their roles, but it is Plummer as the conflicted and enigmatic Law and a stunningly affecting Daniel Baldwin as one of the victims who raise the film to the proper level of horror.

Plummer nails Law's maddening mix of fear, obfuscation and sincere contrition in scenes with his counselors, the Pope and a victim who confronts him in his home. Baldwin is a revelation as a haggard, haunted man trying to keep the painful memories and rage from further derailing his adult life.

There are a few wan stabs at humor and some use of shopworn genre cliches - Garabedian, for instance, is not as caffeinated and vulgar as Danson's ambulance chaser turned hero - that induce a few cringes, and the Boston accents are inconsistent.

While it's horribly unfortunate that there is a story to tell, ``Our Fathers'' does so with compassion and without ambiguity.

``Our Fathers.'' Saturday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. Three stars (out of four).

But Showtime's willingness to dramatize the crisis doesn't negate the fact that it has come up with a disappointing and overlong movie, one that doesn't do emotional justice to its subject matter. ''Our Fathers," which premieres on Saturday night at 8, is certainly graced with weighty performances by Christopher Plummer as Cardinal Bernard Law and Brian Dennehy as the Rev. Dominic Spagnolia, who publicly condemned the church's inaction. But the script operates too much like a quickly made TV movie about legal maneuvering, or a double episode of ''Law & Order." It trades depth of focus for ripped-from-the-headlines superficiality.

Part of the problem is the movie's ambition, as screenwriter Thomas Michael Donnelly and director Dan Curtis try to fit in too many points of view. They want to give us a comprehensive take on the abuse crisis, and not a tragedy involving specific people. ''Our Fathers" winds up as a crowded group portrait -- of injured local parishes, of an imperious religious institution, of a persistent media outlet (the Globe), and of the legal system. That portrait has taken the Globe and other newspapers years to paint in daily installments. Even at two-plus hours, such a far-reaching movie is doomed to seem incomplete and sketchy.

And when ''Our Fathers" does find something of a focus, it's the least interesting one possible. Lots of screen time is forked over to Ted Danson's Mitchell Garabedian, the lawyer who helped expand the John J. Geoghan case into a full-fledged church scandal. For one thing, Danson's performance is monotonous, as he plays one note -- a noble drive for justice -- from beginning to end. We can guess his Garabedian is moved to help the victims by a sense of integrity, but we get no true feel for the man and his motives as he goes door-to-door looking for victims. And we know he'll ultimately succeed in bringing his cause to light, robbing his sleuthing scenes of any suspense.

The movie, which is based on David France's book ''Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal," might have been more engaging had it committed itself to anatomizing the inner workings of the church. The scenes portraying Law's pride and resistance -- revealed with haunting subtlety by Plummer -- are fascinating. As Plummer shows Law weighing the crimes of the church fathers against a public-relations disaster, he ushers in an almost Shakespearean pathos.

Dennehy, too, makes his scenes jump out of the movie's slow march. As Spagnolia, attacking the church from the pulpit, he brings a visceral moral outrage to the proceedings. The broken-spirited victims -- among them Daniel Baldwin's Angelo DeFranco and Chris Bauer's Olan Horne -- are much less compelling. They should be the heart and soul of the story, but ''Our Fathers" portrays them as generic figures of blue-collar angst.

Given the nature of the movie, which includes a few carefully restrained glimpses of molestation, Curtis wisely infuses the tone with gravitas. But occasionally, ''Our Fathers" sloppily veers into the cartoonishness that plagues so many TV docudramas.

Damien Atkins, the actor portraying Geoghan as a young man, goes over the top with his sicko grinning. The sequences involving the Globe are consistently silly, from the smoking in the newsroom to Globe editor Martin Baron's invented exclamation, ''Someone tell the Jew from Miami what I'm missing here." And, as usual, there are too many distractingly bad Boston accents. The story of pedophilia in the Catholic Church certainly needs to be told, but with more accuracy and more humanity.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.

It is the mother of all qualifiers: Based on a true story.

And while the Showtime film ''Our Fathers" is based on the scrupulously researched nonfiction book of the same name by David France, it is not entirely true.

Taking what is known as artistic license, the filmmakers have taken liberties with the truth, creating composite characters and, in some cases, making up scenes and dialogue.

There are some characterizations that are open to debate. As Cardinal Bernard Law, actor Christopher Plummer exudes the angst and remorse that many victims of sexual abuse complain Law never showed them in real life. Brian Dennehy plays the Rev. Dominic Spagnolia, an outspoken Lowell priest who challenged Law's handling of the abuse crisis, only to be revealed as someone with sexual indiscretions in his own past. Spagnolia is portrayed in the film as something of a hero, while his real-life role remains somewhat murkier.

As Mitchell Garabedian, the indefatigable plaintiff's lawyer, Ted Danson is Sam Malone with a law degree, so different from the real-life tenacious, mercurial attorney as to be unrecognizable.

But the film also contains some scenes that are not just questionable characterizations. They are made up. There is a scene in which Pope John Paul II advises Law to go back to Boston and face the music. It's possible the pontiff and Law had a conversation like that, but there is no record of it.

There's a scene in which Law is channel surfing one night, alone in his residence, unable to find anything to watch besides the news with demands for his resignation, until he comes across an old movie in which Richard Burton, as Thomas Becket, gets knifed in the cathedral for opposing Henry II. Very ironic. But there is no record that it ever happened.

There's a scene showing a news meeting during which Boston Globe editor Martin Baron refers to himself as ''the Jew from Miami," demanding that his underlings explain why Globe reporters were stymied in getting records about abusive priests. Apparently, this is an attempt at some Shavian exposition, so the viewer would understand that, as an outsider, Baron cast a colder eye on the church in Irish Catholic Boston.

But, besides the small matter that Baron never said this, the average viewer might be more drawn to the image of so many journalists smoking in a cramped office. Alas, even that cliche is not true: the Globe is a smoke-free building.

The screenplay also has several references to ethnic stereotyping that are jarring. There's a scene in which an American priest, apparently meant to be a Vatican flunky, refers to his Italian clerical colleagues as ''spaghetti benders." There is another scene in which one of the characters makes a crack about Jews being cheap. Again, there is no record of these remarks being made in real life.

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.)

But how much corrective action has the church really taken? Disapproving parishioners asked this question last month as Law (who after leaving Boston in disgrace was granted a ceremonial but highly visible appointment in Rome) led a Mass for thousands mourning Pope John Paul II at St. Peter's Basilica.

"Our Fathers" points to no clear-cut victory. The film's conclusion seems to mark no more than a beginning for reform. Such a saga doesn't make for a bracing piece of entertainment.

"I don't know that this is entertainment," says journalist David France, whose book served as the basis for the film. "I think it's history that we're trying to reflect. This certainly is not a documentary, but in an important way I think it covers what the emotional journey has been like for those who took it. I think that's its power.

"And until we see there's some sort of real conversion of thinking in the Catholic Church about this subject, which we haven't seen yet, I think the issue needs to be hammered away at."

Directed by Dan Curtis ("The Winds of War," "War and Remembrance"), the film stars Ted Danson as Garabedian and Christopher Plummer as Law. Brian Dennehy is outspoken Father Dominic Spagnolia, who boldly condemns the abuse and systematic cover-up from his pulpit ("This is not a Cardinal! This is a Nixon!"), but is eventually driven from the church.

The screenplay by Thomas Michael Donnelly is based on "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal," the book France wrote after reporting on the scandal for Newsweek.

France says at first he saw the story as one of crime and malfeasance.

"But then I found deeper and more fundamental themes, like hope and faith" on the part of the victims and other outraged Catholics. Their spiritual response, he says, was personal, a process necessarily apart from the church. "They pulled together this movement that penetrated the cardinals' inner circle and took control of history."

This, says France, was only after victims who tried to alert the church were told "that it's YOUR obligation to keep it quiet - to save the church. That the only thing standing between the church and scandal is YOU, not the ongoing presence of the priest. They had brought civil litigation because nobody was paying attention to them - and then they were being called enemies of the Catholic family.

"But the litigation they pursued was what brought public attention to the policy. It was the thing that saved the Catholic Church from this policy, and may have saved generations of kids from the same sort of abuse."

What they did is the wrenching but important story of "Our Fathers." And, as France proposes, "It was Christian work - isn't it?"
---
On the Net:
http://www.sho.com
---
EDITOR'S NOTE - Frazier Moore can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org

Since the 1990s, our examination of the sexual abuse scandal has gone through the phases from cover-up, to investigative journalism’s exposure, to the reports of national committees, to the response of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to the commentaries on the responses.

This last year the artists have come forward. On Broadway, the play “Doubt” has pitted a zealous nun against a parish priest in the early 1960s. Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bad Education” place boy-abusing priests in the dark basements of their plots.

Now prime-time cable TV, which may reach more viewers than Broadway and art films combined, gives us “Our Fathers,” based on David France’s critically admired book Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal. By “church” we mean Boston in 2002, the church of Cardinal Bernard Law.

Showtime, sensitive to critics from both the right, which might accuse it of prejudiced church-bashing, and victims’ groups quick to pound a speaker who sticks up for priests’ rights, has been careful in script, casting, photography and tone to do this right. Within the limitations of its two-hour format, it has produced a work that gives everyone who cares about the church a lot to think about.

The story is familiar to anyone who has followed religious news over the past three years. But the director (Dan Curtis), writer (Thomas Michael Donnelly) and cast present it so effectively that in key scenes we sometimes feel that we are confronting the scandal for the first time. Except for two composite characters -- victim Angelo DeFranco (Daniel Baldwin) and Mary Ryan (Ellen Burstyn), the single mother of seven abused boys, who wrote a powerful letter to the cardinal in 1984 -- the names are real. Even Pope John Paul II (Jan Rubes) and Bishop Wilton Gregory (Julian Christopher) appear. And an unnamed Vatican cardinal with gray hair, steely eyes and a German accent, listed as “The Pope’s Cardinal,” informs Law that the majority of American bishops want him to quit “the sooner the better.”

Boston lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson), pursuing the case of several abused young men, discovers when The Boston Globe investigative spotlight team breaks the story in 2002 that what had seemed an isolated case is really “the tip of the iceberg.” (In fact, NCR had been hammering on that iceberg for 20 years.) The Boston situation quickly assumes extraordinary dimensions, as if modeled on Watergate and All the President’s Men, as investigators trudge through neighborhoods knocking on doors, prelates in wood-paneled studies mutter about the “sensational press” and editors cluster around the morning conference table and ask, “But what if we’re wrong?”

Young working-class men in their 20s and 30s -- their lives ruined by drugs, depression, booze and broken marriages -- linger in pubs over beers, watch the arrests of Frs. John Geoghan and Paul Shanley on the TV screen and feel those knots tightening in their stomachs. Their old wounds erupt; they call their classmates and discover hundreds of fellow victims; they organize support groups and join the suit.

We center on three cases: those of Patrick McSorley, now jobless, homeless and addicted to drugs after being victimized by Fr. Geoghan; Tom Blanchette, who had carried on a long, willing series of encounters (condensed in the script) with Fr. Joseph Birmingham before breaking away; and Olan Horne, another Birmingham victim, who organized the survivors into a Joseph Birmingham Support Group. Fr. Birmingham, not as nationally notorious as Frs. Geoghan and Shanley, seems to have had the sexual appetite of an alley cat, seducing hundreds of boys and summoning Tony Blanchette to his bed a hundred times in all, sometimes two or three times a day.

In a strong subplot, the blunt Fr. Dominic Spagnolia (Brian Dennehy) joins the chorus of critics of the church’s power structure and uses the F-word almost as often as Tony Soprano, until his old gay lover, from a relationship he had while he was on a leave of absence from the priesthood, goes public and the cardinal forces Fr. Spagnolia to leave the active ministry.

The evening before I viewed the film I had dinner with friends on Long Island in the diocese of Rockville Centre, N.Y. -- friends disenchanted with the leadership of their bishop, William Murphy, one of several bishops from the Boston archdiocese who ran into trouble on their next assignments. Bishop Murphy will not enjoy this film: He is portrayed as constantly at Cardinal Law’s side, as if a co-conspirator in the Boston archdiocese’s maneuvers to shirk full responsibility for the scandal.

Bernard Law himself must thank Almighty God and Showtime that the great Christopher Plummer was chosen to portray him, for Mr. Plummer brings to the role a dignity, an ambiguity, a vulnerability that the public, as far as I know, has never perceived in Cardinal Law himself. Mr. Plummer is blessed with a mobile face, any part of which he can twitch or shudder to wordlessly convey a variety of emotions. His voice is so rich that he can simply listen silently to a bad news phone call and utter two words, “I see,” hang up, and thus convey the content of the call.

In one powerful scene, Olan Horne breaks in on Cardinal Law, calls him “Bernie” and convinces him to meet with his support group. Confronted with this crowd of men and women who have every reason to despise him but who have agreed to be respectful, Mr. Plummer’s Cardinal Law is not haughty but visibly humbled. The viewer feels for him. Since I had never heard of this event before, I bought the book to check its authenticity. It happened, all right, but three months after Mr. Horne’s invitation.

Even more compelling is Mr. Blanchette’s visit to Fr. Birmingham’s deathbed, where, bursting into tears, the young man asks the barely conscious priest to forgive him for the hatred he had felt.

In Rome, Cardinal Law kneels before John Paul and reluctantly volunteers to resign. The pope sends him home to work on the scandal. There the courts have ordered Mr. Garabedian and the diocese to settle, and both Voice of the Faithful and 58 priests call for Cardinal Law’s resignation. The cardinal sits alone watching himself lambasted on TV, clicking from channel to channel in a vain attempt to escape his public humiliation.

Finally he finds rest in a movie channel: It is the climax of Richard Burton’s 1964 “Becket,” where King Henry II’s knights have arrived at the cathedral where Archbishop Thomas à Becket stands in his miter and golden vestments. The knights raise their swords and strike him down. Cardinal Law’s lips seem to twist in a knowing smile.

Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is professor of humanities at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. His e-mail address is raymondschroth @aol.com.

Movies about abused children and scandal have been a staple of television for years - all the way back to 1984 and the groundbreaking TV movie "Something About Amelia," in which Ted Danson played a seemingly normal American dad (married to Glenn Close) who sexually abused his daughter. That then-controversial (and Emmy Award-winning) movie propelled sexual abuse into the forefront of American consciousness, and grew Mr. Danson's star power. Now, after an illustrious sitcom career has dissipated into sporadic film work, Mr. Danson returns to the topic in Showtime's "Our Fathers," on the other side of the law.

And, alas, with far less dramatic results. In this overlong Showtime movie (premiering this Saturday at 8 p.m.) about the scandals involving sexually abusive priests in the Boston area, Mr. Danson plays a zealous lawyer who investigates allegations against one local religious leader and stumbles onto a scandal of mammoth proportions. Had we ever understood his character's motivation or background, we might have cared; but in the years since "Amelia" and even "Cheers," Mr. Danson has acted less with his head than he has with the hideous hairpieces he has chosen to put on it. He has evolved into a distraction, not a force, or as the focal point of what might have made a compelling, subtle drama of right and wrong. By focusing on Mr. Danson's detective work - instead of the more dramatic battle taking place within the local archdiocese - "Our Fathers" goes wide of the mark.

It's an unfortunate miss, especially when measured against the potential for powerful storytelling in the premise. Its great virtue lies in two key supporting performances: Christopher Plummer as Cardinal Bernard Law, who tried everything he could to suppress the scandal; and Brian Dennehy, who worked just as relentlessly to fan its flames. Only after an extended prologue - with prolonged and tedious scenes of middle-aged men experiencing their tortured recollections of childhood abuse, then seeking out Mr. Danson's help - do Messrs. Plummer and Dennehy even show up. Whenever they appear on screen, the movie comes to life; the energy of their conflict takes us into the murkier moral questions at the scandal's core. Do any of us really doubt the horror of child abuse by priests? Of course not. But what's even more terrifying is the notion of the church's leadership (reaching nearly all the way to the Vatican) hiding its scandals for the sake of its reputation, and putting the faith of its followers in jeopardy.

Whenever Mr. Dennehy shows up on stage or film, it's a revelation for lovers of great acting. He, too, has explored the dark side of abuse in a riveting performance as serial child killer John Wayne Gacy in the 1992 TV miniseries, "To Catch a Killer," and that awareness seems to inform his performance here. Mr. Dennehy has grown into the ultimate alpha male for the middle-aged man; his beefy body and buzz-cut hair lend authority to every word he speaks. And when, as the impassioned Rev. Dominic Spagnolia, he stands at his pulpit and rails against the kind of abuse he has chosen to fight - the abuse of religious authority - Mr. Dennehy's words shake us to our core.

Had this movie dared to deal more fundamentally with the warring factions of the Catholic Church, it might have found more of an audience than it's likely to get with its plodding and overly comprehensive approach. We didn't need scenes of Mr. Danson driving around Boston looking for former victims of abuse, nor do we feel satisfaction when he finds a willing witness (Ellen Burstyn) behind the second doorbell he rings. We didn't benefit much from the repetitive discussions of recovered memory (or lack thereof) among the victims - most especially not from Daniel Baldwin, who these days acts mostly with his neck. Good movies ought to have a single mission; "Our Fathers" tries too hard to be comprehensive and satisfying on multiple levels, and falls wide of the mark on most. There's a far better movie buried in the cracks of this one, but only the most patient of viewers will find it. The rest will change the channel in boredom before Messrs. Plummer and Dennehy even show up.

The idea that Our Fathers , a Showtime dramatization of the sexual-abuse scandal that has rocked the Archdiocese of Boston, would have a David-vs.-Goliath feel seems strangely apt.

Ted Danson fills the "David" role as lawyer Mitchell Garabedian. Christopher Plummer, as Cardinal Bernard Law, plays "Goliath."

Based on the best-selling Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal , from Newsweek writer David France, the movie highlights the struggles of the victims of Roman Catholic priests.

The sufferers, having grown up, see Garabedian as slick and smug -- just ambitious, or crazy, enough to battle such a powerful organization.

His eager work, along with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of The Boston Globe about priest and pedophile John Geoghan, brings the revelations to light.

Despite strong-arm tactics by the archdiocese, Garabedian discovers closed records with evidence of a cover-up by church officials.

He also meets Mary Ryan (Ellen Burstyn), a mother of seven boys who were abused by Geoghan: Her letter of complaint, sent to Law in 1984, represents the smoking gun that the lawyer seeks.

What happened "is not the act of a caring church," Law weakly contends.

Instead, he describes the circumstances as "the actions of one depraved man."

Garabedian prompts the court to unseal 11,000 documents that prove otherwise.

Soon after, the story inspires an uproar that sparks a series of investigations nationwide; the Vatican is forced to acknowledge the unfolding news.

Our Fathers succeeds because of the solid performances of the two leads.

As an ambulance-chaser turned crusader, Danson shows a surprising believability.

The pitch-perfect Plummer, meanwhile, portrays Law as a cardinal walking a fine line between arrogance and vulnerability -- a formidable figure, stuck in quicksand, with a mask of invincibility.

Brian Dennehy exudes his typical no-nonsense demeanor as Father Dominic Spagnolia, whose condemnation of the cover-up has an unfortunate result.

Even the usually bottom-feeding Daniel Baldwin, of the famous band of thespian brothers, lends a passion and blue-collar grit to the part of Angelo DeFranco, one of the victims.

At times, the movie becomes too heavy-handed -- and Burstyn seems woefully underused.

Such sins are forgivable, however.

Our Fathers combines a compelling drama with the intensity of a legal thriller.

The director, Dan Curtis, has created an engrossing tale of human tragedy that has yet to produce its final chapter.

Box Story:* Our Fathers will premiere at 8 p.m. Saturday on Showtime.

GRAPHIC: Photo, Showtime/, From left, Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson), Patrick McSorley (James Oliver), and Angelo DeFranco (Daniel Baldwin)

Showtime original series "Our Fathers" Chris Bauer as "Olan Horne" and Christopher Plummer as "Cardinal Law" (Photo by - Ken Woroner/Showtime)

There may be Roman Catholics who will regard "Our Fathers," Showtime's Saturday 9 p.m. movie about the church's pedophile priest scandal, as more exploitation, more Catholic-bashing. Olan Horne has another word for the film: "courageous."

Horne is one of the victims. In 1970, consumed with guilt and shame, he confided to Rev. Joseph Birmingham, a friendly, new priest at his church in Lowell, Mass., that he was being sexually molested by a member of his family. Birmingham first coaxed a graphic description of the abuse from him and then asked Horne to show him his genitals. Horne was frightened. He was 12. He did as he was told.

"Showtime has been as courageous as any individual who decided to come forward, because there's still a stigma attached to this," Horne, a butcher by trade, told a group of TV writers in January. "Nobody can have a healthy conversation. I have a family that has difficulty even talking about the issue."

Horne didn't step out of the shadows and speak up until he was middle-aged. An earlier victim of Birmingham, Bernie McDaid, recalled that he did tell his parents and that they reported the priest - in 1969. The priest was transferred. To Lowell.

"Huge fallout"

"The Catholic Church said that they went and got him help, but they never did," said McDaid, now a painting contractor. "The records show differently. The fallout from this is huge, and it needs to be exploited more. We need to talk about it more because the damage, as far as I'm concerned, they raped my soul. OK? They took God from me at age 11, and that needs to be known."

"Our Fathers" is arguably the best film Showtime has yet produced, one that matches anything its premium-cable rival, HBO, has done in terms of production values and social relevance.

The cast is heavy with respected stage-screen veterans, many of whom, according to executive producer-director Dan Curtis ("The Winds of War"), sought out roles. The big names include Christopher Plummer, who portrays Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of the Boston diocese who resigned in 2002 in the face of louder and louder protest. Brian Dennehy is Rev. Dominic Spagnoli, a priest who was booted from his church for complaining loudly from the pulpit about the church's inaction on its pedophile problem. Ted Danson is Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston attorney who started representing a few sexual-abuse victims, wound up with more than 80 and won them a $10 million settlement. Ellen Burstyn has a riveting cameo as a working-class matron who confides to Garabedian that all seven of her sons were molested by their parish priest.

The movie is shocking, though not so much for the reason you might assume. The molestation scenes are kept to a representative few and, even then, rendered by director Curtis with restraint - nauseating horrors are implied but, mercifully, not shown.

No, the jolts come more from seeing and hearing high-ranking Catholic clergy plotting a strategy of stonewalling and silence with their attorneys and public relations advisers in ways - and occasionally in words - that bring to mind Richard Nixon's notorious Oval Office tapes or even HBO's "Deadwood." There's some profanity, yes, but more than that it's the bare-knuckle boardroom attitude. This could be Enron's bosses under siege.

"A real-time history"

"Most of the dialogue is taken verbatim from my book, which is a piece of journalism - you know, kind of a real-time history," said David France. He said that anything that isn't an exact reproduction of what he was told in interviews "at least represents the substance and the intent of the speaker."

France's book is "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal," published last year in hardback to considerable acclaim and now out in paper. France said he worked on the book and the screenplay, the latter in concert with Thomas Michael Donnelly, more or less simultaneously. "He was writing a page or two behind me the entire time," France said.

The screenplay required drastic condensation - the book is almost 650 pages long, spans a time frame of about 50 years and involves hundreds of characters - and it shows occasionally in the movie, particularly in the first half. With so much jumping back and forth in time and so many characters to establish, an excess of informational dialogue is hard to avoid.

Blue-collar survivors

Still, Donnelly's scenes of adult survivors of abuse, most of them tough, blue-collar guys, finding each other and sharing their stories are deeply touching. They're the emotional core of the movie. None is more intense than the sequence in which Horne (played by Chris Bauer, previously sensational as an ill-fated union boss in HBO's "The Wire") bluffs his way into Cardinal Law's residence and confronts "His Eminence" with a living, breathing, hurting example of the abuse he has been so unwilling to acknowledge even in the abstract.

"Don't turn away from Christ, Olan," a shaken Law tells Horne. "He didn't fail you. I failed you."

Donnelly and director Curtis allow Law several moments of apparently sincere contrition. In another scene, the cardinal, dared by Horne, meets with a group of abuse survivors and their families and listens ashen-faced to their stories of depression, broken marriages, drug abuse and suicide. But the filmmakers also pointedly remind viewers, in where-are-they-now text at the end, that after acknowledging that he and his office had responded to complaints about pedophile priests by simply reassigning them to new parishes, the Vatican gave him a prominent ceremonial job in Rome. Though the film's epilogue doesn't mention it, Law was recently seen on worldwide TV saying one of the funeral masses for Pope John Paul II.

France said the church's response to "Our Fathers" has been silence. "They haven't said a thing to us about the film," he said. "I think I can say with some authority that the act of revelation, the publication of the book, was received enthusiastically by the Catholic community, by Catholic organizations of all stripes, left and right. But the church itself, the institutional church itself, said nothing one way or the other."

Couldn't film in Boston

Filming took place in and around Toronto - using an Episcopal church. "We couldn't film in Boston," France said. "We tried to get permits to film in Boston. We couldn't."

He insists the purpose of the book and the movie is not to bash but to encourage continued discussion and promote healing. "I'm hoping that we're now in the transition to this kind of new challenge," France said. "And that's to see how the church will rebuild itself, will regather its victims, will pull its family together, will respond in the future to allegations, will seek to really chart that new course. I'm hoping that projects like this film will help spark that discussion in the future."

Horne, who is involved with the church hierarchy in the Boston area as well as with abuse survivors, said keeping communication open is imperative. "If we didn't do it, they wouldn't understand our pain," he said. "And they wouldn't understand, as Cardinal Law said, the pathology."

Even more emphatically, Horne suggested that we, as a society, need to pay more attention to the larger problem of child sexual abuse. "This is not a Catholic issue," he said. "I was abused not only by a priest, but also by somebody associated with my family. It is so easy for us to push this over to the Catholic church and say, 'Look how horrible this is.' It is horrible, but I have some bad news for you. It's happening to people you know, and it needs to be dealt with."

Besides being an absorbing drama reminiscent of Costa-Gavras' classic "Z," the Showtime movie "Our Fathers" is a phenomenon in itself. The pedophile priest scandal in the American Roman Catholic Church has become so familiar -- in fact, such a cliche -- that it has become fodder for a cable docudrama.

Its director, Dan Curtis, is a veteran of television epics ("Dark Shadows," "The Winds of War," "War and Remembrance").

The national scandal, of course, is far too large to encompass in 85 minutes -- and it is hardly the sole property of the United States. "Our Fathers" is based on David France's 2004 book, "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal."

As in "Z," the true story plays out like contrived melodrama, with villains entrenched in high places and a hand-to-mouth lawyer clawing at a fortress for a morsel of justice for the victims he represents. But he happens to be in the right place at the right time for a domino to fall on another domino.

The right place is the Boston Archdiocese in the late '90s when the right forces were in place to bring mercilessly mounting pressure on Cardinal Bernard Law. He had spent decades moving pedophile priests from parishes where their crimes had become public to parishes where they could commit new crimes -- until discovered again and transferred again, ad infinitum.

A peculiar facet of the Catholic Church scandal is that ordinary pedophiles, when caught, went to prison before being released to abuse new victims. Abusing priests were inconvenienced by having to move, but rarely inconvenienced by arrest, trial and incarceration. And the moves may not have been so inconvenient. Predators are always seeking new sustenance.

For economy, "Our Fathers" follows the story through lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson). Hired by one victim, he found more, then scores more. As in "Z," one story led to another until the emerging picture grew to awesome enormity.

On the sidelines here is another group that the film might have followed, the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, which won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Had "Our Fathers" followed them, it would seem a replay of "All the President's Men," another tale that outreached the imaginations of the reporters who started with small leads.

Cardinal Law (Christopher Plummer) is depicted as a decent, phenomenally obtuse guy, accustomed to the veneration he enjoyed since donning the red hat in 1985, now agonizing in the harsh light he cannot elude. In all sincerity, he sees himself as a harried victim, befuddled by bizarre new pressures. He had long basked in the widespread knowledge that Pope John Paul II considered him special. Now growing throngs shouted for his resignation.

(Ultimately, the pope gave Law a plush sinecure in Rome after he resigned in shame. Like his exalted confreres, he participated in the election of Benedict XVI.)

For a fuller picture of the sex scandal, France's 656-page book is a must, but Curtis and scenarist Thomas Michael Donnelly do a decent job of summarizing and dramatizing the scandal. As if speaking for the film, Garabedian says more than once that what he's found is "only the tip of the iceberg."

The film can't explore why so many clearly gay men were accepted into the priesthood and how it has affected the church. But it does a fine job of dramatizing the devastation that pedophile priests caused and that the church has labored systematically to conceal. The film does note that many priests are gay without being pedophiles.

There is no way that Catholics and non-Catholics could see the same film, even sitting side by side. But the drama is compelling and may perhaps affect the real drama that has ground on for decades.

Personal note: I was a Roman Catholic seminarian in California, hoping to become a priest in the Redemptorist order. I was 14 when I entered in September 1954. I loved everything about it and was a serenely happy lad. I was expelled in October 1956, a week or so after my 16th birthday.

A friend confided that he loved another boy. Torn between ratting out a pal and doing what I well knew was my duty, I confided in another boy who was not at all torn. He instantly reported what he knew. He, too, was expelled. As the rector told me, it was "like a cancer" that had to be cut totally and immediately. The lad who inspired my friend's affection also was expelled. I've always wondered what the rector told him.

The point is, in 1956, any hint of homosexuality -- even merely knowing of it -- was grounds for radically changing young lives.

I still recall the seminary fondly. I never heard of such a thing as a pedophile priest until I was in my late 20s. All the priests I knew in the seminary were good guys, except for a few who were great guys.

Ted Mahar: 503-221-8228; tedmahar@news.oregonian.com

If ``Our Fathers,'' the new TV film about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, were being shown on a major network or a prominent cable channel, it already would be a lightning rod for controversy.

But ``Fathers,'' based on Newsweek reporter David France's critically acclaimed book, is a production of Showtime, the premium cable channel that is a poor cousin to HBO despite an often-admirable slate of original films and series. As a result, it will air this weekend (8 p.m. Saturday) without the kind of advance national publicity normally lavished on a big TV film.

Too bad, because ``Fathers'' is everything most television docudramas about recent events are not: thoughtful, restrained without sacrificing emotion, and with a clear ring of truth to it. It is sensational only to the extent that the case itself rocked the very foundation of the church itself. It is inflammatory only to the degree to which Catholics were inflamed by the church hierarchy's reaction to the abuse of hundreds of children by priests they trusted.

While the abuse scandals in other U.S. dioceses are mentioned, ``Fathers'' is devoted to the scandal that rocked the diocese of Boston and its powerful archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law.

Boston was ground zero for the tragedy that enveloped the U.S. church starting in 2000. The cases of such abusive priests as John J. Geoghan, Joe Birmingham and Paul Shanley erupted there. (Although it initially took on the story with great hesitation, the Boston Globe would win a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for its coverage.) It was in Boston that a group of fervent victims and passionate lawyers went toe-to-toe with the politically powerful Catholic hierarchy, forcing not only multimillion-dollar settlements but also the resignation of Law.

Written by Thomas Michael Donnelly with the cooperation of France and directed by veteran Dan Curtis (``The Winds of War''), ``Fathers'' succeeds on a number of levels.

In one way, it's a classic courtroom drama with civil attorney Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson) pursuing a seemingly doomed case against the diocese. Garabedian -- dismissed as ``that ambulance-chasing bastard'' by one of the church's lawyers -- is a heroic figure in the film: committed, sensitive and willing to take risks other lawyers would avoid. Another is Judge Constance M. Sweeney (Deborah Grover), a devout Catholic who stuns the church's attorneys with rulings that release a flood of damning documents to public view.

On another level, the film comes across as a religious ``All the President's Men'' or a scripted version of the recent documentary ``Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,'' painting a scathing picture of the Catholic hierarchy's cynical attempts to stonewall and obfuscate. Law (played by a very good Christopher Plummer) comes across as little more than a scheming, imperious corporate executive trying to distance himself from a scandal he helped to create.

Nor does the late Pope John Paul II come off unscathed. Despite the warnings of such church leaders as Wilton Gregory (Julian Christopher), president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, he does not fully acknowledge the church's culpability or act to force Law's resignation.

Instead, John Paul tells Law: ``Holy mother the church does not make sacrifices at the altar of public opinion. Go home, Bernard. Work to solve the problem. And know you have my support and my prayers.''

That's a bit like telling Kenneth Lay to fix the culture at Enron or making Tom DeLay the chairman of the House Ethics Committee.

But as compelling as these elements are, the real emotional core of ``Fathers'' is the way it handles the effect the abuse had on the victims. Without being explicit, the film captures the horror these young men went through as their innocence, faith and trust were ripped away.

In a sense, these men (played by, among others, Daniel Baldwin of ``Homicide'' and Chris Bauer of ``Third Watch'') are exorcizing their shame through the judicial process. But long after the physical harm, they still are being abused by a church that tries to isolate them and by some people who make jokes about what they went through.

When victim Olan Horne (Bauer) confronts Law toward the end of the film, you can feel every bit of his pain and humiliation as he launches into a profane tirade. ``How in the hell did you let this happen?'' rages Horne. ``You should have known. You should have looked out for us.''

There are things to quibble about with ``Fathers.'' Several key characters are composites, notably Baldwin's Angelo DeFranco and Mary Ryan (Ellen Burstyn), a mother who provides key evidence in the case. Some of the dialogue clearly is made up. And while it serves to highlight the point that being gay doesn't make someone a pedophile, the story of Dominic Spagnolia, a gay priest who battles for the victims, slows down the film at key moments despite a powerful performance by Brian Dennehy.

But overall, ``Our Fathers'' is a forceful work that will jar even those viewers who have been following the scandal and its impact on the church.

What may be even more jarring: After spending time out of the limelight at a seminary outside Washington, D.C., Cardinal Law resurfaced as archpriest of the Basilica St. Mary Major in Rome.

Last month, Law -- still a prince of the church -- presided over one of the principal funeral Masses for Pope John Paul II.

Our Fathers*** 1/2
Airing 8 p.m. Saturday, Showtime
Cast Ted Danson, Christopher Plummer, Brian Dennehy, Daniel Baldwin, Ellen Burstyn, Chris Bauer
Writer Thomas Michael Donnelly
Director Dan Curtis
Note David France's book, ``Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal,'' is available in trade paperback from Broadway Books ($16.95).

Cardinal Bernard Law, recently criticized for leading a memorial Mass in Rome for Pope John Paul II, is one of the central figures in a Showtime original film premiering May 21.

The film, Our Fathers, takes an agonizing look at the damage done by sexually abusive priests in the archdiocese of Boston. The exposure of the scandal is foreshadowed by the film's opening, taken from the Gospel of Luke: "There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known."

The film, is based on Newsweek journalist David France's book Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal .

The docudrama depicts the anguish of victimized boys who become dysfunctional and wounded adults. It also captures the grief experienced by the cardinal himself for not dealing with priests who molested children under his watch. Christopher Plummer gives a subtle but exquisitely tormented performance as he faces victims' support groups and angry parishioners.

The film centers on attorney Mitchell Garabedian, victims who come forward to tell their story, reporters at The Boston Globe and, Cardinal Law.

The flashback scenes, while not sexually graphic, show the anguish through the eyes of a child who knows what is about to happen – again.

Ellen Burstyn plays Mary Ryan, a composite of real mothers who had several sons molested by the Rev. John Geoghan (who, in real life, was convicted of child molestation and killed in prison). Her character is asked by the church not to go public. She saves a copy of an angry letter she sent to Cardinal Law in 1984, which becomes a key exhibit in a lawsuit against the archdiocese.

The film also shows a victim, now an adult, who can't let his own 3-year-old son out of his sight. He describes his overwhelming fear: "If a priest can molest a boy, anything can happen."

Robin Galiano Russell, a Dallas freelance writer, can be reached at rrscribe@excite.com.

DETAILS: Our Fathers, starring Ted Danson, Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, will premiere at 7 p.m. May 21 on the Showtime cable network.

When it's time for the kindly visiting parish priest to go up and bless the kids goodnight, the worried boys at the top of the stairs grimace and shudder.

They know what's coming.

The uncomfortable scene depicting a young Father John J. Geoghan making a house call in Hingham, Mass., in 1967 opens "Our Fathers," the powerful and courageous new Showtime film exploring the sex-abuse scandal in the Boston Diocese over the past half-century.

Written by David France - concurrently with his best-selling investigative book, "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal" - it comes to TV May 21, just a few weeks after TV devoted hundreds of hours to the inner workings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Precious little time during last month's exhaustive coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II and the naming of his successor mentioned the dark chapter of the Catholic Church, though. "Our Fathers" - a strongly acted film starring Ted Danson, Brian Dennehy and Christopher Plummer (as Cardinal Bernard Law) - brings back the scandal that unfolded over three years, implicating thousands of priests across the country and the coverup of the abuse that led to some of the church's highest offices.

Already the two stories have collided: A screening of "Our Fathers" in Boston was canceled in deference to the pope's death.

And while the film is solidly based on the scandal that grew out of Boston, director Dan Curtis shot it entirely in Toronto, and not because it was cheaper to do there.

"We couldn't film in Boston," says France, who completed the screenplay before he finished his 650-page book. "We tried to get permits to film in Boston. We couldn't."

It was part of a general stonewalling from Boston - and the archdiocese - about the issue in general.

"What we learned in Boston was that there's a corporate problem, and that the corporate CEOs were responsible for the problem," France says. "What we haven't seen yet is those corporate CEOs taking responsibility, with being somehow given their penalties for this."

There is some irony that Danson - who came to fame from another TV production set in Boston, specifically a bar "where everyone knows your name" - plays the lawyer representing the victims, Mitchell Garabedian.

"I didn't have a huge desire to play Mitchell Garabedian," Danson told a press session earlier this year. "I had a huge desire to be part of this piece" because of its social importance. In particular, he says, he was impressed by the victims, who lent their stories and names to the project.

"Instead of being victims or just buried in the anger, they've gone out and tried to find ways to bring healing to both the people who were victimized by the church and healing to the church itself."

For those whose stories were told, it was odd to see it played up on the screen. But Olan Horne, who is portrayed by Chris Bauer on screen, says he was touched by seeing the youthful version of himself in peril. "All of what you need to know about these issues are in this film," he says.

None of the abuse is explicitly shown, other than a priestly hand on a knee or close-ups of tearful children. But the actors who portray the victims as grown-ups - including Bauer, who played dockworker Frank Sobotka in the second season of HBO's "The Wire" - occasionally explode into detail of what they had to endure.

Plummer, in portraying Law, bears little physical resemblance to the portly cardinal, but he has one of the more complex performances, eking out a bit of sympathy as a man who didn't want to see the church harmed.

Turning in a brief, powerful performance is Ellen Burstyn as the mother of seven boys abused by Geoghan. One solution offered to solve the Geoghan problem, early in the film, is to "send him to Hartford."

To balance the impression that all priests were predatory, Dennehy plays a fiery parish priest from Lowell, Mass., who decries the scandal from the pulpit and who in private speaks like a member of "The Sopranos" (all dialogue is from firsthand reporting, France says).

Dennehy says his performance was fired by personal outrage.

"I live in a small town in Connecticut, and there's a family there whose name I will not mention for whom this series of incidents was a source of particular grief," he says. "The boy grew up to be a man who killed himself when he was 40. Never recovered.

"The thing about this crime is that it's the crime that keeps on giving. It's not just the kids. It's their families, their brothers and sisters, their uncle, their aunts, their wives or husbands, their children. Generation after generation, person after person. It's a terrible, terrible, devastating crime. And for a church - any church - or hierarchy - any hierarchy - to participate in the coverup, in the concealment of this crime so that the crime continues to be committed, is unspeakable."

The film ends by noting that Law, who was forced to resign his post as archbishop in Boston, ended up with a more prominent position - in Rome.

But "Our Fathers" was completed before Law emerged in a more prominent role, running the pope's funeral.

And while there are scenes that involve Pope John Paul II discussing the issue, there is nothing from German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, although when the future Pope Benedict XVI was asked about the scandal at the time, he dismissed it as mostly media hype, saying, "I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the U.S., is a planned campaign."

“Law knew but did nothing. It's huge," says a Boston Globe reporter, referring to Cardinal Bernard F. Law's alleged awareness of priests within his archdiocese molesting young boys, as the sexual abuse scandal was about to explode.

The scene is a critical moment in "Our Fathers," the Showtime pay-cable channel's dramatization of David France's book, "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal," premiering Saturday, May 21, 8-10:15 p.m. EDT.

"Our Fathers" begins with the disclosure of Father John Geoghan's trail of abuse after one of the victims, Angelo DeFranco (a composite of several people), comes forward years later, and continues through revelations about Cardinal Law's alleged inaction, his unprecedented deposition, and eventually his resignation as archbishop of Boston amid noisy protests and rising animosity. He'd eventually be reassigned to Rome by Pope John Paul II.

The first hour concentrates almost exclusively on the predations of Geoghan (Damien Atkins), shown first as a peculiarly moist-eyed young man, at his ordination at Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston in 1962, then as a young priest, slyly charming his way into his parishioners' homes, and asking if might go upstairs to give the little boys a blessing, and presumably fondling them under their blankets. Though nothing is overtly shown, the terror on the boys' faces speaks volumes.

The accusations of DeFranco (Daniel Baldwin) are what set the ball rolling. When he learns that his abuser is still doing parish work, he's so incensed he's inspired to seek legal recourse.

Later, the molestations of Father Joseph Birmingham (Scott Fink) come under scrutiny when, in a flashback scene, young Tom Blanchette is removed from class, and asked to lower his pants while the priest looks on. Again, the scene is discreetly played, but what's happening is chillingly clear.

The third priestly plot strand involves Father Dominic Spagnolia of St. Patrick Parish in Lowell, Mass., who charges reproachfully from the pulpit that the priests were "wolves not shepherds."

He's played in rabble-rousing fashion by Brian Dennehy as a staunch opponent of the church's slowness to respond, but then the target of a sordid accusation himself.

An inability to act is the principal fault attributed to Cardinal Law in his depiction by Christopher Plummer, who draws a Hamlet-like figure, well-intentioned but confused, a leader who left important decisions to others: first the handling of the early complaints against various priests, and then the fallout from the ensuing crisis. At his deposition, he explains that he "relied on his bishops (for) ... day-to-day decisions." He is shown as having compassionately believed that the offending priests might somehow be reformed. As soon as he's aware of the extent of the crimes, he begs forgiveness from his congregation for "tragically incorrect judgments."

He's further shown to be a man of conscience when he is confronted by one victim, Olan Horne (Chris Bauer), who boldly walks into his residence for a verbal reckoning. Cardinal Law meets with him, and when Horne says his faith is shattered by past abuse, Cardinal Law entreats him, "Don't turn away from Christ, Olan. He didn't fail you. I failed you." Cardinal Law then agrees to accompany him to a support group meeting of former victims, where he listens to heartfelt testimony.

Despite the nuanced portrayal by Plummer, the script relies, for the most part, on the testimony of victims and their legal representatives. No reference is made to Cardinal Law's efforts throughout the 1990s to deal with abuse of minors by clergy in his archdiocese and only a passing reference is made to the efforts of the U.S. bishops in general.

The archdiocese's attorney Wilson Rogers Jr. (Will Lyman) is portrayed as a smarmy, corporate lawyer, whose only priority is to protect the church's interests, offering cash payments, accompanied by confidentiality clauses, when all else fails.

The victims' case is taken up zealously by Mitchell Garabedian (Ted Danson) -- who manages to work around court orders keeping archdiocesan documents confidential by attaching samples of them to his own motions for the world -- and the Boston Globe -- to see.

While turning a spotlight on the clerics, "Our Fathers" is primarily the story of the victims -- mostly blue-collar workers from the Boston area. They include, besides Blanchette (Hugh Thompson) and Horne, Patrick McSorley (James Oliver), Gary Bergeron (Thomas Mitchell) and Bernie McDaid (Aidan Devine). They all make the pain of their abuse achingly vivid.

The DeFranco character is portrayed as the most obstinate victim, caring less about settlement money than the opportunity to accuse Cardinal Law while looking him in the eye. Garabedian convinces him that some of the other victims desperately need the cash -- most of all McSorley, who is living on the street.

Given the one-sided narrative, Garabedian and the Boston Globe are portrayed as the heroes of the story, along with Jim Muller (Joseph Ziegler), founder of the Voice of the Faithful, a grass-roots movement for change in the church. On the other hand, church officials are mostly shown to be rather more concerned with their image than with the victims.

When the Geoghan charges come to light, Cardinal Law and his associates are shown carefully planning their PR strategy. However, no mention is made of the steps that the archdiocese took against Geoghan, before the Globe "broke" the story in 2002, including removing him from parish ministry by the mid-1990s and obtaining his dismissal from the priesthood by the pope in 1998. Nor is there any attempt to foster an understanding of Catholic theology and law by which even a bishop does not have the final say over a man's continuing in the priesthood.

There are subtle criticisms of the priestly formation process when Geoghan's fellow seminarians, including Spagnolia, ponder how they will be able to help people when many of their colleagues know "nothing of the world."

The film contains reasonably respectful depictions of the late Pope John Paul II (Jan Rubes) and then-Bishop Wilton D. Gregory (Julian Christopher), at that time president of the U.S. bishops, shown during a Vatican sequence, where he tells the pope, "The laity must hear something bold from Your Holiness," after which we see the pope proclaiming that the abuse is "an appalling sin" and later asking the tearful Cardinal Law, "Bernard, why has it come to this?"

In response, Cardinal Law offers to step down. But the pope refuses to accept the resignation, takes his hand and explains, "Holy Mother Church does not make sacrifices at the altar of public opinion."

Ellen Burstyn has a powerful scene as a mother with seven boys, all abused by Geoghan.

Dan Curtis has directed a handsome production, and the performances are solid.

The filmmakers have, needless to say, re-created a lot of history. In some scenes involving Cardinal Law and his closest associates, one wonders what sources were used for these private conversations. They have also telescoped history, irresponsibly departing from the book by showing Father Spagnolia being disciplined by an auxiliary bishop who, by that time, had left Boston for another assignment.

And one other bit of dramatic license that cries out for correction is a written postscript informing us what's happened to all the characters -- such as McSorley's death from a drug overdose. The final title card reads, "Although a 'one-strike' policy was approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, there is no formal mechanism to enforce it."

Since the events dramatized in "Our Fathers," at least 700 priests have been removed from ministry in Catholic dioceses on account of the commitment made by the bishops in the "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People" adopted in June 2002.

The sexual abuse scandal is unquestionably one of the saddest in the history of the Catholic Church in this country, but to imply that the church is not acting to eliminate this abuse is simply not so. The producers have declined to follow through with an official request that the wording of this postscript be changed.

It's a pity that a film handling a difficult subject with a good deal of sensitivity -- and which has as its core theme the issue of truth-telling -- will, for the sake of dramatic punctuation, leave viewers with an impression that is patently false.

The film contains some profanity, much rough language -- including quite a few uses of the "f" word -- crass, sometimes irreverent, expressions, and some graphic descriptions of sexual acts.

HOLLYWOOD -- While David France's novel "Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal" was a bestseller and the feature adaptation has all the riveting content needed for a theatrical run, pic will debut on Showtime later this month. At the Tuesday preem, held at the Directors Guild of America, exec producer David Kennedy explained why he took the project, to the cabler.

"The film has such power that I think people will watch it from home; but I don't know that they would pay money to see it because these days people are looking for films that are not incredibly powerful; they want to see fantasy," Kennedy said. "That is what the market is today. So if you want it to be successful you go to pay cable and in this case Showtime."

When asked how he thought Catholics would respond to the pic, France said: "I think that the Catholic people, more than anyone else, are interested to know what happened in their church and their interest is really undying."