TV REVIEWS : Bland Response to ‘Stop the Church’

Rick Flynn’s documentary on Catholic gays and lesbians, “A Journey for Understanding” (at 11 tonight on KCET Channel 28), might have been meant as a wake-up call, but there will be a lot of nodding heads around the old tube tonight.

That other film on the schism dividing Catholicism and gays and lesbians, “Stop the Church,” is glimpsed here momentarily, and it’s certainly the work that looms over Flynn’s film. Everything shown in “Journey” appears to be in some way a response to the charges stated in “Stop the Church”--among them that the Catholic Church’s opposition to homosexual love has made it distinctly incapable of humanely responding to the AIDS epidemic.

Some, though, might see Flynn’s 30-minute piece as showing a completely different side to the gay and lesbian community from the stark, theatrical and raucous ACT UP sit-in in a Catholic church in “Stop the Church.” Indeed, the Catholic project highlighted here is Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney’s “Communidad” network of gays and lesbians throughout the city. Flynn’s dull, talking-heads concept never sheds much light on what “Communidad” really does beyond holding talks and gatherings, though he does take us inside one of the AIDS hospice homes run by the Catholic-sponsored Serra Project.

The message is that many Catholics do care--about AIDS victims, and gays and lesbians--with Mahoney at the forefront. The subtler message, though, is that Catholic gays and lesbians have a great schism of their own. While Teresa Mendoza of Lesbianas Unidas describes how she could no longer endure the shame she was made to feel as a practicing lesbian Catholic, Jim Curtan passionately relates how being gay and Catholic has become “prophetic,” a vanguard of a new Catholic spirituality.

Whatever the message, though, Flynn’s bland, quiet response to “Stop the Church” could have used some of that film’s urgency, and its innate understanding that a religious institution cannot afford to ignore any portion of its followers.