A Question of Faith : Television: Church calls movie about a molestation scandal ‘distorted,’ but filmmakers disagree.

Using terms like “distorted fiction” and accusing the filmmakers of having “an agenda” to make the church look bad, Roman Catholic officials and observers are taking sharp exception to a new HBO movie based on a 1980s sex scandal in a Louisiana diocese involving a priest and dozens of boys.

The movie, “Judgment,” premiering tonight at 9, focuses less on the molestations and more on the attempts of the bishop and his vicar general to cover it up.

The scenario revolves around a family (the Guitrys, played by Blythe Danner and Keith Carradine, with Michael Faustino as the son) and their flamboyant attorney (Jack Warden), who battle the entrenched power of the diocese.

Although names are changed and events juggled, the plot closely follows a case that caused a sensation when it surfaced in 1984 at the Lafayette diocese deep in Cajun country. Father Gilbert Gauthe admitted molesting 37 children, including altar boys and parish Boy Scouts, and was given 20 years in prison without benefit of parole.

Although Gauthe attracted the most celebrity, seven priests eventually were removed and the diocese and insurers reportedly paid families more than $22 million in settlements. The family on which the movie family was patterned won $1,025,000.

The revelations were the first pedophilia case of such scope to scandalize the church. There have been many others reported since. Jason Berry, a prominent investigative reporter in New Orleans who specializes on Catholic affairs and is completing a book on pedophilia and homosexuality in the church, estimates that the church has paid between $100 million and $300 million in 100 child sexual settlements in the last six years.

In the movie, the Guitrys join other families seeking financial settlements from the church, but insurance lawyers insist that the church not give the families spiritual solace, on grounds that that would constitute an admission of liability and damages would be costlier. The Guitrys are very devout but grow furious that the bishop and his staff had known about the abuse but kept giving the offending priest new assignments within the parish. They break from the group and hire an attorney. Then the case becomes public.

Asked to comment on “Judgment,” Msgr. Alexander Sigur, new vicar general of the Lafayette diocese portrayed in the movie, referred The Times to a written statement that he made to written questions from Sister Mary Ann Walsh, media editor of the Catholic News Service. She had supplied him with a copy of the film.

“Only a part of the film,” Sigur responded, “is based on fact and the balance is distorted fiction. . . . The portrayal of the church’s reaction to that priest’s conduct is totally distorted.”

The truth, he said, is that “immediately” upon receiving notice that the priest was accused of committing these pedophilic acts, he was removed and “criminal proceedings were instituted.” He also disputed how the movie “fictitiously depicts” the church as “callous” about the victims.

Getting a movie made on the events at the parish was problematic. Executive producer Steve Tisch (“The Burning Bed,” “Risky Business”) said that he and producers Ron Hershman and Dan Wigutow pitched the idea to CBS and NBC and were turned down. ABC, however, declaring itself not turned off by the controversial theme, ordered a script, Tisch said.

But later, Tisch said, when he asked for some assurance that “top management of Capital Cities,” which owns ABC, would fully support the project, “a top network executive . . . took it to a top Cap Cities executive--who said that it (the movie) is not going to happen at ABC.”

An ABC spokesman said that the project was dropped because the network had done two other molestation movies (“Deadly Silence” and “Unspeakable Acts”) and that “it did not go up the corporate ladder,” as Tisch described.

Hershman, who previously produced a segment on the Louisiana parish scandal for the CBS news magazine “West 57th,” and Wigutow then met with HBO and got a go-ahead when Tom Topor agreed to write and direct. Topor had written the Broadway play and screenplay for “Nuts,” which has an incest theme, and “The Accused,” about a gang rape.

First-time director Topor has only seen an early “rough cut” of the film because, he related, he was fired late in the production after battles with his producers and was replaced by veteran director David Greene (“Roots,” “Fatal Vision”). But he stands by what he saw that far, he said.

Relevant sources who were asked to pre-screen videocassettes of “Judgment” had many criticisms--erroneous church liturgy, faulty legal references, a mixing of time frames.

A longtime New York City news reporter, Topor agreed that some people might find distortions in the movie and said that he did make “certain extrapolations”: “The question is whether I distorted its emotional essence or its narrative essence, and I don’t believe I did.”

J. Minos Simon, the attorney portrayed by Warden, thought the portrayals were “excellent,” but maintained that the filmmakers were “generous” with the bishop.

“His agony was not over wanting to tell,” he said. “His agony was over the fact that the secrecy lid was lifted and he was exposed for the first time.” He contended that the bishop knew about Gauthe’s “proclivities” but kept transferring him within the diocese “to a fresh new lot of victims.”

Simon had an informant--not a priest and not one who was blackmailed into helping, as shown in the movie--who discovered diocese files which revealed that at least 24 priests, about one-fourth of the priest population in the diocese, were homosexual. This information, falling into Simon’s hands, “jarred” the diocese and forced it to admit liability, Simon said.

Veteran reviewer Henry Herx of the Catholic News Service complained that the film makes no attempt at balance in treatment of the clergy, “not even one good priest.” He commended the filmmakers for focusing on the “agonized family rather than the sexual crimes of the clergyman.”

The candor of the film won’t offend Catholics, but they’re likely to be “much more sensitive” to the treatment of the church as an uncaring bureaucracy, he said.

Father Gregory Coiro, a public affairs official in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, found the movie priests “stereotypical and unrealistic.” He said that while the subject should not be covered up, “I really feel that the people who made this movie had an agenda, and I’m sorry to say but I think their agenda was to make the church look bad.”

He said that the priesthood has its failures “as in any other profession. There’s 55,000 priests in this country and a person who doesn’t know this could very easily get the impression--especially with (recent widely reported scandals involving priests and even archbishops)--well, ‘My God, the priests are all a bunch of perverts.’ Thing is, most priests are very, very hard working and very, very caring and none of that is addressed. It’s almost like all priests are guilty by association.”

Berry, who did the first in-depth reporting on the Louisiana case, said that while the film contained “gross distortions” from the facts of that case, a drama can’t be held to the standards of investigative news.