The German Catholic Church's study on the sexual abuse of minors by clergy members recognizes thousands of victims. Movies have often portrayed their plight. German author Bodo Kirchhoff revealed his own personal story.
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8 films portraying Catholic Church sex abuse
"By the Grace of God," premiering in Berlin, depicts the Church's attempted cover-up of a sex abuse scandal. Such cases have long been explored by feature films. Here are a few memorable works.
Image: Jean-Claude Moireau
'By the Grace of God' (2019)
Francois Ozon's Berlinale entry focuses on the true story of a group of sex abuse victims who've formed an association to break the silence, years after they were molested by a priest in Lyon. The father's widespread abuse was known by his diocese's cardinal and even the Vatican. The actual Cardinal Barbarin, who attempted to cover up the case, is now on trial and could end up in prison.
Image: Jean-Claude Moireau
'Spotlight' (2016)
Based on a true story, this biographical drama directed by Tom McCarthy follows a team of reporters from "The Boston Globe" as they uncover systemic child sex abuse by Catholic priests in their city. "Spotlight" garnered six Oscar nominations and won for best picture and best screenplay. The actual investigation also earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
Dark images, silhouetted actors shown out of focus: It's the cinematography of a horror film. Chilean director Pablo Larrain tackled an explosive topic in "The Club," in which four retired Catholic priests live in a secluded house and there "purge" horrible crimes, including child sex abuse. Larrain was inspired by true stories of high-level priests who live in hiding to avoid criminal charges.
Image: Fabula
'Verfehlung' (2015)
The German film "Verfehlung" (Misconduct) by Gerd Schneider depicts how the friendship of three priests is affected by a sex abuse scandal. One of them is accused of molesting teenage boys, and the two others react to their friend's situation in different ways. The way they deal with the truth could impact not only their relationship, but also their career in the ranks of the Church.
Image: Camino-Filmverleih
'Philomena' (2013)
With "Philomena," Stephen Frears deals with another aspect of the Church's institutional abuse: women who were forcibly separated from their children born out of wedlock. The film is based on the true story of Philomena Lee, whose son was taken away by the nuns at the convent where she was forced to work and sold to wealthy Americans. Actress Judi Dench portrayed the older Philomena.
Image: Imago/Zuma Press
'Bad Education' (2004)
While Pedro Almodovar's drama "Bad Education" is a stylized murder mystery playing on different levels of metafiction, it also tells the story of a young boy being molested by a Catholic priest in his boarding school. Ignacio, the abused child, is later a transgender woman who confronts the abusive father and blackmails him.
Image: Imago/United Archives
'The Magdalene Sisters' (2002)
The Magdalene Asylums, also known as Magdalene laundries, were Catholic Church institutions that served as a reformatory for women labelled as "fallen." Peter Mullan's 2002 drama portrays one such home, telling the story of four young women who were sent there by their families, or caretakers, and who faced extreme cruelty and abuse by nuns. The last such institution closed in 1996.
Image: picture-alliance/United Archives/Impress
'Primal Fear' (1996)
A 19-year-old altar boy (Edward Norton, in his Oscar-nominated film debut) is accused of brutally murdering an influential Catholic Archbishop. An ambitious defense lawyer (Richard Gere) takes on his case. In the course of the trial, it is revealed that the beloved archbishop had abusive tendencies and had forced altar boys into sex.
Image: Imago/United Archives
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"It is always the dark sides of our lives that accompany us to the place where someone else is waiting for us naked," wrote Bodo Kirchhoff in his 2004 novel, Wo das Meer beginnt (Where the sea begins).
The sentence could also serve as an overarching theme for the writer's entire work. In his novels and writings, semi-autobiographical images repeatedly appear: the half-naked choirmaster in boarding school, sometimes a mother or classmate waiting half-naked in bed. These haunted him.
Kirchhoff traces back his experiences of sexual abuse to when he was a four-year-old child and his mother took him to bed with him. He is not satisfied with the term "abuse," which he describes as "leaving a tremendous hole in the language."
For the author born in 1948 in Hamburg and who grew up in the Black Forest region, writing later served as a therapy. Diving into the stories of his novel characters felt good. They served as weapons against the demons of his past.
Bodo Kirchhoff's writing was his therapy. He won the prestigious German Book Prize in 2016 for his novel, Encounter Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Dedert
A bold coming out
The German author's novel Infanta was a huge best-seller in 1990 and Kirchhoff became a popular talk-show guest. He however found it difficult to build on his success afterwards.
It took years for him to openly discuss the dark memories that kept him captive and unproductive.
Following the large-scale sex abuse scandal that hit the Odenwald private school in 2010, Kirchhoff publicly revealed how he too was molested during his youth. His autobiographical essay published in the weekly Der Spiegel made him one of the rare authors to have outed himself as a victim of abuse.
The Odenwald school went bankrupt and was closed in 2015, following the revelation of numerous cases of sexual abuse of studentsImage: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Dedert
He was as a 12-year-old in a boarding school. The culprit was the school choirmaster and his religion teacher. He played the guitar, smoked heavy Roth-Händle cigarettes and drove a Volkswagen convertible — and that made the man seem disarmingly cool. Yet it was actually an unscrupulous pedophile who was running the Protestant boarding school.
Why victims stay silent
Keeping silent, looking away and covering up was how people reacted to such monstrous events at the time, says Kirchhoff.
"There was no scandal at the boarding school; only interrogations by people who wanted to know every detail — more to get excited by them than to be shocked. I had to talk about a thing for which there was no language; I had to invent one. That's also how you become a writer."
He wrote that he could understand why victims of abuse don't reach out for protection: "You prefer to keep the intimate dirt to yourself than to expose it to an even dirtier world that just disrespectfully pretends to be shocked."
A lasting scar
He further dealt with his experiences as young boy in the 1950s and 60s in his 2018 autobiographical novel, Dämmer und Aufruhr. Roman der frühen Jahren (Twilight and turmoil. Novel of the early years).
With the new study released by the German Catholic Church revealing thousands of cases of sexual abuse by clergy members, Kirchhoff's account is a timely portrayal of a situation too many people have gone through in silence.
Still, despite the therapeutic effect of writing, the wound never heals, says Kirchhoff: "The true drama remains untold."
