TV REVIEW : ‘Sins of the Fathers’: Catholicism’s Cancer

If it didn’t already exist, Bill Kurtis’ latest entry in the Arts and Entertainment Channel’s “Investigative Reports” series, “Sins of the Fathers” (at 6 and 10 tonight, with subsequent repeat broadcasts), would easily serve as the prototype of high-concept video muckraking.

Mixing sleaze with philosophical crisis, Kurtis’ look at the increasing wave of child molestation cases committed by Catholic priests will both please the ratings department’s craving for prime-time sex and send further ripples through an already disturbed Catholic community.

The sleaze factor here reaches its apex with a video snippet of former priest Dino Cinel naked on a bed in a rectory with a young boy, but this is immediately followed with another snippet that cuts to the heart of the issue: In an interview, Cinel justifies his actions as charity, offering quality sex to an already promiscuous boy.

Thousands of complaints--and several lawsuits and convictions--have created a pattern that the Catholic hierarchy remains unwilling to fully confront. First, there is the sexual violation itself; then, church authorities’ attempt to hide the abuse by quietly moving the accused priest to another parish, or to a psychiatric facility, or by stonewalling parents, even flexing the church’s legal muscles.

The effect of all of this might be described as a cancer rotting the institution from within. Victim after victim, many of them having won out-of-court settlements after protracted legal battles, build a tragic epic of extraordinary abuse of the body and mind by men placed in positions of almost unquestioned authority.

Kurtis’ report can’t avoid, of course, speculating on the hidden culture of priesthood and its rumored homosexual subculture, especially as many of the tried abuse cases have involved men with boys. Just as the growing scandal has reinforced anti-Catholic prejudices, “Sins of the Fathers” may aid enemies of homosexuals by devoting time to psychologist Charles Socarides’ theory that gay men--and perhaps many priests--are basically arrested in adolescence.

The quest for ratings, alas, can send even good reports like this down a slippery slope.