After a wave of clergy abuse was reported in the early 2000s, films, documentaries and TV series were made to address the subject.
The issue of child sexual abuse by priests has plagued the Church for decades and has resulted in numerous criminal investigations, thousands of lawsuits and bankruptcy filings by many dioceses.
Documentary filmmaker Robert Greene knew his approach to the subject had to be different.
“What the movie is really about is living with that trauma every day, and I don’t think we’ve seen that enough. I don’t think we’ve seen what it means to live with and beyond that. of that, what that means means to do something about it,” he told The Associated Press in a recent interview.
His approach was to film six men trying to heal through drama therapy that uses theatrical techniques to promote mental health.
“We worked with the six men, all of whom were abused by priests as children, sexually abused by priests and primarily in the Kansas City, Missouri area, and we work with them and Monica Phinney, a drama therapist and a few other creative people to come together to create scenes about power rituals and about memories and nightmares and stuff to approach that in a completely different way,” Greene explained.
Michael Sandridge, one of the film’s subjects and consultants, said that, from his perspective, theater therapy served as an influence and structure for the film.
“But when it comes to therapy per se, a drama therapist can’t handle an abused person in therapy,” he explained.
Greene said: “It’s very important what Michael (Sandridge) says about ‘She wasn’t our therapist’ because, you know, in therapy you don’t edit, do you? In therapy, you don’t go through the process of saying what you think, going through what you have to go through, and then later on you cut that into scenes that become a movie. In a way, the editing process was the most therapeutic for us. It was all six guys were intimately involved in the editing, and we were going back and forth and really creating this thing together.”
Sandridge, who was abused by a Catholic priest as a child, said he would like “the churches to stop playing with it” and would like to see the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse abolished.
“And in terms of getting over it, you never get over it,” he said. “You pull through. And that’s how I look at it, and I think every guy helped each other through something.”
“Procession” is currently streaming on Netflix.
